Recently, the global open source geospatial conference FOSS4G 2026 concluded in Hiroshima, Japan. At the event, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) presented the 22nd Sol Katz Award to Ian Turton, co-founder of GeoTools. I noticed that many people use QGIS and GDAL every day but may not have heard of this award, so today I would like to introduce it.
What is the Sol Katz Award?
The full name of the Sol Katz Award is the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software. It is presented annually by OSGeo to recognize individuals who have provided long-term leadership in the open source geospatial community and have advanced the open source philosophy. The first award was given in 2005 to Frank Warmerdam, the founder of GDAL. Since then, the award has been administered by OSGeo and is usually announced at the closing ceremony of each year's FOSS4G.
My note: FOSS4G is the annual global open source geospatial conference hosted by OSGeo. Maintainers of projects covering desktop software, data formats, spatial databases, and map services attend every year, and this award is one of the most closely watched individual honors at the event.
Above: this year's medal
Who was Sol Katz?
Sol Katz, whose full name was Solomon Stuart Katz, was born in Sweden in 1947. When he was one year old, his family moved to New York. He later worked for many years at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in GIS-related roles. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in geology and later received a master's degree in computer science from the University of Denver. He was one of the early GIS practitioners with a geology background.
In the early 1980s, he helped develop the public domain GIS package MOSS, one of the earliest open source GIS systems in the world. He later maintained PC MOSS, a version that could run on personal computers, and its source code is now available in OSGeo's GitHub repository. He also built data translation tools such as DEM conversion and SDTS readers, and often answered questions on mailing lists. He liked to wear Hawaiian shirts and toucan or propeller hats. The photo below was provided by his daughter.
He battled lymphoma for nearly a decade and passed away on April 23, 1999.
Past Recipients
I have roughly compiled the list of all 22 awards. Almost every open source GIS tool we commonly use has someone behind it who has received this award.
- 2005, Frank Warmerdam, founder of GDAL/OGR and the first recipient.
- 2006, Markus Neteler, long-time leader of GRASS GIS.
- 2007, Steve Lime, founder of MapServer.
- 2008, Paul Ramsey, PostGIS, GEOS, and uDig.
- 2009, Daniel Morissette, MapServer and OGR.
- 2010, Helena Mitasova, long-time contributor to GRASS GIS and the FOSS4G community.
- 2011, Martin Davis, founder of the JTS Topology Suite.
- 2012, Venkatesh Raghavan, one of the initiators of the FOSS4G conference.
- 2013, Arnulf Christl, co-founder of OSGeo and long-time contributor to project incubation.
- 2014, Gary Sherman, founder of QGIS. I previously wrote about him in "He Changed the GIS Software Landscape: The Story Behind His Retirement."
- 2015, Maria Brovelli, promoter of FOSS4G and the open source geospatial education network GeoForAll.
- 2016, Jeff McKenna, long-time global promoter of FOSS4G and OSGeo.
- 2017, Andrea Aime, core developer of GeoServer and GeoTools.
- 2018, Astrid Emde, long-time contributor to OSGeo and the German FOSSGIS community.
- 2019, Even Rouault, long-time maintainer of GDAL and PROJ.
- 2020, Anita Graser, long-time QGIS advocate, plugin author, and educator.
- 2021, Malena Libman, connector across multiple communities and organizations.
- 2022, Sandro Santilli, PostGIS and GEOS.
- 2023, Howard Butler, PDAL, with long-time involvement in foundational libraries such as GDAL, PROJ, and GEOS.
- 2024, Tom Kralidis, pycsw and pygeoapi, a familiar figure in the GeoPython community.
- 2025, Nyall Dawson, core contributor to QGIS.
- 2026, Ian Turton, co-founder of GeoTools.
The complete list can also be checked against the OSGeo Wiki.
Summary
In China, QGIS, GDAL, PostGIS, and GeoServer are used in many projects. In China's domestic IT innovation and cross-platform scenarios, open source software is often considered as an alternative. However, among the 22 Sol Katz Award recipients so far, there is still no winner from mainland China. Of course, this does not mean that no one in China writes code. Rather, it reflects a pattern of heavy use but limited long-term public contribution. Open source is often treated as a free toolbox or even as a foundation for in-house development, rather than as public infrastructure to be built together. Europe has already started using public funds to support this ecosystem, as I previously described in "The EU Invests 6 Million Euros to Support Open Source Geospatial Software." I do not know how many more years it will take before we see a developer from China receive this honor.
PS: In fact, there are some excellent open source GIS projects in China, such as maptalks, which I previously introduced in "maptalks: An Open Source 2D/3D WebGIS Development Framework."
If you know of other good open source GIS projects, please feel free to share them in the comments.
References
- Sol Katz Award (OSGeo Wiki): https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sol_Katz_Award
- OSGeo Awards: https://www.osgeo.org/community/awards/
- Ian Turton receives the 2026 Sol Katz Award: https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/ian-turton-receives-the-2026-sol-katz-award/
- FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026: https://2026.foss4g.org/en/
- PC MOSS source code archive: https://github.com/OSGeo/MOSS/