Arnulf Christl was honored today with the 2013 Sol Katz Award
for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software during the FOSS4G 2013 conference in Notthingham, UK. The award was presented by Jeff McKenna, the president of OSGeo. Arnulf’s dedication to open source geospatial software, and the community and ideals around it are widely recognised. He played a large role in the Mapbender project, and was a founding director of OSGeo, as well as serving as president for several years. He has also been a key bridge between OSGeo and the Open Geospatial Consortium, emphasizing the duality of open source and open standards. He continues to advocate for these ideals inside and outside OSGeo.
Background
The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software is
awarded annually by OSGeo to individuals who have demonstrated
leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have
contributed significantly through their activities to advance open
source ideals in the geospatial realm. The hope is that the award will
both acknowledge the work of community members, and pay tribute to one
of its founders, for years to come.
Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of
work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities.
In the early 80’s, Sol assisted in the development of a public domain
GIS package called MOSS (Map Overlay and Statistical System). This
software was arguably the first open source GIS software in the world.
Sol would later go on to release and maintain PC MOSS. He was also one
of the first involved in public data translator utilities. Utilities
that he developed for converting DEMs and reading SDTS files were
contributed back to the geospatial community, and are still available
today. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list
servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large.
Sadly, after fighting Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma for almost a decade, Sol died April 23, 1999 in bed. His legacy will always live on in the GFOSS world.
