Have you ever wondered what would make a 'traditional' closed-source company the size of Bentley, decide to venture into open-source? Because although it may come as a surprise to most of you, we ARE working with open source... Is it because of the old adage 'if you can't beat'em, Join'em?' Everyone seems to be doing it, so are we just being -fashionably- late? Or does it make business sense? And once we decided, how did we go about it? What was the s/w used? How did we use it? And how did it fit in within our corporate ecosystem? What were the challenges we faced both from a cultural and technical perspective? And maybe more importantly, how serious are we about this? Do we contribute back or are we there just for the taking? What are our plans for the future? This talk will answer these and other questions, describe the journey we have just started in the open source landscape and hopefully prompt a discussion about the benefits of what should be a symbiotic relationship between closed and open source paradigms, rather than a competitive or even parasitic one.

1. 1 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated© 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Bentley’s travels in the Open Source World
FOSS4G 2017, Boston MA
Pano Voudouris
Martin Icking

2. 2 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Bentley is a software company
3541 employees
752 SW Development/Release Engineering

3. 3 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Bentley is a software company

4. 4 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Why?
• Brief History
– CS-Map coordinate system library in Bentley Map / Microstation (2003)
– OGR – shapefile import in MicroStation (2005)
– MapServer / Openlayers in AssetWise (2013)
• Reason behind it?
– Very mature Open source projects
– Well documented
– Feature rich
– Limited internal resources
– Difficult to compete in terms of features and quality

5. 5 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
What?
• Mapserver
– Map rendering engine
– Server side Spatial publishing (Oracle/SQL server -> WMS/WFS)
• Openlayers
– switched to OL3 immediately after official release
• Why the choice?
– Mapserver/Geoserver: Limited exposure to java technology stack –
preference to have C/C++ based software (.NET based even better –
Bentley is mostly using Microsoft Infrastructure including Azure
– Openlayers/Leaflet: At the time, more homogenous, mature framework

6. 6 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
What?
• CesiumJS
– an open-source JavaScript library for managing 3D data

7. 7 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Where?
• AssetWise (visible in the UI)
– MapServer
– OpenLayers
– Cesium
• MicroStation / Bentley Map (under the hood)
– CS-Map
– OGR (SHP import)

8. 8 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
(web) Technology stack

9. 9 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Feature editing with OpenLayers

10. 10 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Visualizing 3d data with Cesium

11. 11 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Challenges faced
• Cultural
– Big company, lots of in-house systems. Corporate ecosystem
• Over-estimation of internal SW quality compared to popular OS software
– Can we really be dependent on free software?
• Javascript’s huge ecosystem with a big choice of .js libraries helped a lot
– Nowadays no-one is working WITHOUT OS software
• Technical
– Sync repositories
• In the past – load one OSS version into our private source control system – do our own
enhancements / fixes – unable to sync back / contribute
• Now - forked GitHub repositories – pull requests and frequent updates of the OS s/w.

12. 12 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Community engagement
• Cesium consortium
– Partnership with AGI

13. 13 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Community engagement
• Mapserver
– Several Pull requests
• Openlayers
– todo…

14. 14 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
Is it working out?
• Positive feedback from
– Users
• Like to see well-known components in our software
• Often a good fit to their ecosystem
• Sometimes a selling point!
– Bentley colleagues
• Like quality and responsive support
– Senior management
• Likes software reuse, quick progress using mature libraries and standards

15. 15 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
What’s next?
• Cesium / 3D Tiles ongoing
• OGR driver for Dgndb
– DGNdb – new SQLite based format for storing/syncing design content.
internal discussions- Similar to Geopackage
• Push OL3 changes back to repository

16. 16 | WWW.BENTLEY.COM | © 2017 Bentley Systems, Incorporated
-THE END-
Questions?