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Five decades ago, Jack Dangermond and his wife Laura started a boutique consultancy with a rather grandiose name: Environmental Systems Research Institute. Over time, “E-S-R-I” has simplified to just “Esri.” …

The last month has been pretty wild. In the last 30 days, 145K people have been kind enough to visit my blog posts. Many have reached out privately with feedback, rebuttals, words of encouragement, and there have even been a few pleas to curse less. On that last point: dang, ok.

I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and curiosity of the folks I’ve met through this blog. The proportion of constructive comments to destructive ones is easily 10:1, and that’s despite navigating trending stories on Hacker News twice this year.

So, I’m starting a monthly newsletter. You can sign up here: https://joemorrison.substack.com/welcome …

I work at Azavea, but this is my personal blog. What’s written here is my personal opinion and nothing more. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

The news yesterday that the new version of Mapbox GL JS will be proprietary shook me.¹

I am not a zealot. I do not feel entitled to others’ intellectual property, even if they’ve given away their ideas in the past. I know from experience how exhausting, thankless, and exploitative the work of creating and maintaining open source software can feel.

Until yesterday, I was still clinging to a few shreds of romantic optimism about open source software businesses. Mapbox is the protagonist of a story I’ve told myself and others countless times. It’s a seductive tale about the incredible, counterintuitive concept of the “open core” business model for software companies. …

Special thanks to Jennings Anderson who looked over an early draft of this post and helped me refine it. Also, as usual, the views expressed herein do not represent those of my parents, my wife, my dentist, or my employer.

The first time I spoke with Jennings Anderson, I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. I mean that genuinely — I did not believe him. He was a little incredulous about it himself. I felt like he was sharing an important secret with me that the world didn’t yet know.

Disclaimer: This is purely my personal opinion and does not reflect the stance of my employer, Azavea. It’s not very “Azavean” to write negatively about a topic — but I think this is worth saying publicly since I can’t seem to shut up about it privately!

A Word of Warning

Anything worth doing will be publicly criticized. In the words of Taylor Swift, the poetic conscience of my generation,“Haters gonna hate.”

Today, I’m the hater.

That said, I deeply admire the entrepreneurs starting satellite imagery platforms and marketplaces. I share their passion for fixing an industry that is obviously, fundamentally broken. …

I believe we are on the cusp of a second golden age of geography. During the first wave, we were on offense. Cartographers during the Renaissance held the keys to unlocking unprecedented understanding about the scope and nature of the world.

But the “second coming of geospatial” that we’re about to live through is all about defense. Climate change is a clear and present threat to humanity’s cumulative wellbeing. The race is underway.

Time is Against Us

There is a dire need to take immediate action to reduce atmospheric carbon (even assuming we manage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally through cleaner energy sources).¹ …

The text below is adapted from an email I sent to an up-and-coming satellite imagery provider. Some details have been omitted or adapted in order to preserve their anonymity. I hope the advice is generally useful to others in their position.

TL;DR

1. Release a small percentage of your data under a truly open license, preferably CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. Ideally, partner with a cloud provider so that data is hosted for free and there are more stakeholders invested in its upkeep than just you (e.g. Earth on AWS, Google Earth Engine, or Microsoft AI for Earth). Let’s call it…1% of your capacity. That has a nice ring to it. …

I recently wrote about the commercial satellite imagery industry and how fundamentally backwards it is. In that piece, I was mainly addressing companies serving up data derived from the narrow swath of electromagnetic spectrum we humans are most comfortable with — visible light (and its nearest neighbor, infrared light). As it turns out, there’s a whole world of spacefaring companies capturing data about the earth in the oft-overlooked expanses of the electromagnetic spectrum that we humans can’t naturally perceive.