There have been a few heads-up over the last week about 52°North, who have just announced an initiative for geospatial open source software. Of course, we’ve heard this before, but this time ESRI are on board. So, we have Autodesk supporting OSGEO, and ESRI supporting 52North’s initiative (it needs a snappy title or acronym). The approach seems different though, because Autodesk chipped in right from the word go by open-sourcing one fork of MapGuide, which they freely admitted was not a core product.