Frequently Asked Questions - Global

Geosparc support is currently available in English only. We have the DNA of a international organization with employees who are fluent in Dutch, French, and Spanish. However, we do not have sufficient coverage to guarantee sustained support in these languages at the present time. We plan to add additional support languages over time.

In order to get the most value, you should purchase a subscription as early as possible in the site life cycle. The emergence of issues that require support is unpredictable by its very nature, so attempting to artfully time the purchase of a subscription is a futile exercise that can lead to costly and wasteful delays.

Most Geomajas GIS web applications are never truly “done”. They iterate continuously through new use cases, experience design, development and content creation, testing, staging, release to production, and optimization. And even if development were theoretically declared to be “complete”, original content and user-generated content are always growing and interlinking in an organic fashion. This can impact site performance and stability and create new intersections with previously dormant software defects.

It's simply our job to do it, and we'll make it work. That said, there are practical things that will help assure we can keep up. For example, testing. Geosparc is investing together with its partners and the community into continuous integration and thorough test batteries. For us, this means contributing as many core tests as we can.

We'll also think carefully about the changes in architecture and promote stable and supportable API's. All of these can help us focus our efforts where we, the business partner, the community and our customer all win.

The interval will vary from release to release. Geosparc will coordinate with the community and the partner network to establish a tested and stable version that will result in a stable release which will be supported.

No, and Geosparc continuously works to ensure that such a thing never occurs. All Geosparc created patches are submitted back to the Geomajas project in a timely fashion. Geosparc developers work closely with core maintainers and contributed module maintainers to ensure that there is little or no divergence between Geosparc Geomajas source code and the source code of available on Geomajas.org.

See the roadmap on the Geomajas website.

No, but we will provide the necessary services that can help you to get started on working with Geomajas. To build out your application, we will refer you to one or more Geomajas Certified Partners who you can trust to complete your project on time and on budget.

Our main goal is to be a product company, not a professional services or GIS project company. So, no - we do not compete with our partners and consultants for GIS projects.

Our developers and architects work with the Geomajas community to fix bugs, to implement missing features, to write documentation or to help sponsor and organize community events. Because Geosparc’s success is driven by the overall success of the Geomajas project at large, rather than the demands of any one customer, we are able to look broadly across Geomajas to identify gaps we can fill that others are not. We hope in this way we can simply be a "strong contributor" within the community's overall effort to make Geomajas better.

Furthermore, we provide commercial support to those users for whom Geomajas is becoming mission-critical software infrastructure. This is important to help the Geomajas community reach out to new and different users. To do this, we may have to dive deep into some particularly thorny issues. Fortunately, having developers working full-time on Geomajas means we can devote resources to hard problems without being constrained by the needs of a single integrating partner, and work to solve problems everybody needs addressed. But we rarely have either the resources or expertise to do this alone; we're always be seeking to work with the community on such problems.

Dirk Frigne is the co-founder and CTO of Geosparc. Dirk founded DFC Software Engineering but is now fully committed to making Geosparc successful. DFC Software Engineering is now a Geomajas Certified Partner of Geosparc.

The entire team at Geosparc strongly believes that Dirk **must** be able to effectively lead the Geomajas project where the community wants it to go - and not negatively affect the project due to Geosparc's needs. He must be able to continue to make technical decisions independent of Geosparc's commercial interests to preserve the overall health of the community and the project.

Therefore, Dirk is expressly permitted to make decisions within the Geomajas project that may not always be in Geosparc's best commercial interest. Additionally, a portion of Dirk's time is spent on activities associated with the project at large (vs. Geosparc's own software development). In essence, since the health and vitality of the Geomajas project at large is extremely important to us, we've taken great pains to make sure that Dirk continues to act for the best interests of the Geomajas community at large as he has from the beginning.

No. We do not claim to own or control Geomajas in any way. Geosparc is a member of the Geomajas community, similar to any other organization. We want to see the Geomajas community succeed and work with the community to advance the Geomajas technology.

We sell service level agreements, consulting and training services. We sell this via a worldwide network of Certified Partners.

We are a commercial Open Source software company. We are the major sponsor of the Geomajas GIS application framework. Our goal is to build a professional partner network that is addicted to solve complex business GIS problems. We provide support consulting and training services to help our partners in solving GIS business problems.