We really should get around to having an early days OpenLayers reunion one of these days–perhaps on the 10th-ish anniversary in 2015.

Because I’m a hoarder and have more important things to do, I trawled through some old files and found that John Frank first contacted me on 20 March 2005 with an email which had the subject line “contract work?”.

I remember that I almost deleted the email as spam (hey, it was two first names, all lower case and about money) but then thought I’d open it anyway and am glad I did.

He had contacted me because he’d seen the Google Maps reverse-engineering I’d been doing (http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/googlemaps.html) and said he wanted to create something with a JS UI that could work with open standards-based map servers.

After some exploration and back & forth I agreed to create a demo for him. We got bogged down in contract negotiations for a while (I was a little wary of dealing with an unknown US company :)) but eventually I worked on the demo that he used in his Where 2.0 presentation. (I ended up at the conference as well because O’Reilly flew me over as a result of my Google Maps-related work.)

I’m a bit hazy on the details but I *think* it was during the time that we were sorting out the contract that someone else built on the original demo I’d created. Although I’m pretty sure what John showed at Where 2.0 had a large proportion of my work in it too. So, yeah, don’t quote me on that. Somewhere I have a photo of the result (including the debug-numbered map tiles due to a slow or broken network ). (I also still seem to have most of the emails etc from around that time for future historians…)

The emails probably have John coining the “slippy” map term–I never really liked it as a term–it struck me as kinda “unprofessional”–but it seems to have stuck. There’s probably the naming of OpenLayers in there as well–I seem to recall having a conversation on the phone with him about it while I was standing in the laundry staring out the backdoor of where I was living at the time.

Oh, look, here it is, from John, dated 7 July 2005:

> how about the name “openlayers”?

To which I replied:

> I’m not so keen on that either, I feel it’s not really descriptive enough.

So, yeah, I guess don’t take naming advice from me? (At least we didn’t end up with slippymaps.com!)

Looks like we first started talking about open sourcing what we were working on back in April but approval didn’t happen until early July.

I remember at the time being a bit frustrated by the delay as it meant a number of other FLOSS projects popped up to “fill the gap” instead of there being one everyone could work on.

I don’t necessarily agree with *all* your observations, e.g. my feeling is that OL was designed from the beginning to be a library suitable to multiple applications; and the map viewer service was perceived as a way to make it easy for people to place their data on a map with only a comma separated data file.

Incidentally, who was the person you met in the bar? I encountered a few names I’d forgotten along the way when I was trawling through the old emails.

While I might do some things different now than I did then I’m thankful for the time spent on OpenLayers and still feel a sense of pride when I see the blue & white directional arrows (probably the only visible evidence of my OL involvement left) on openstreetmap.org or screenshots of Haiti OSM/OL-based relief tools.

Then again, that describes what I would say for just about any open source project I’ve ever worked on.

Any thoughts on the next 6 years?