We’d like to share some exciting news with you about our cloud-based geo-data synchronisation service, Mergin.
In this post we’ll talk both about Mergin the online managed service (Mergin Cloud) and also about the software stack that powers it (the Mergin Software Stack).
Mergin CE
The Mergin Software Stack has been developed and maintained at Lutra Consulting over the past 3 years to power our Mergin Cloud service and has been maturing nicely in production.
We believe a sync service for supporting field-based GIS activities has been a missing piece of the open geospatial puzzle, and as strong advocates of open source software, we’re now sharing the Mergin Software Stack with the community. Therefore, on the 14th of June we released Mergin CE on GitHub. The CE stands for Community Edition.
The release means a fully open solution for field data collection and synchronisation is now possible using QGIS, Input app and Mergin CE.
Mergin CE is released under the AGPL licence and we are open to contributions from others. Looking forward to seeing what the open source community has to offer!
Mergin CE gives you the freedom to deploy, host and manage your own Mergin server on your own infrastructure, giving you complete control over your data. Mergin CE comes without commercial support.
Our main efforts are still very much focussed on the continuous improvement of Mergin Cloud, making it an awesome fully managed service for our customers.
We also now provide Mergin EE (Enterprise Edition) for those who want an on-premises deployment but with extra features like Active Directory integration, commercial support, and/or prefer a licence other than AGPL.
Changes to Mergin Cloud
Releasing Mergin CE got us taking another look at Mergin Cloud’s Community (free of charge) tier. That’s why from today we’re updating Mergin Cloud’s Terms of Service so its free tier can no longer be used to store projects for commercial use. Mergin accounts storing projects for commercial use should now purchase a paid subscription after their initial 14 day evaluation period.
A common surveying setup is a single paid account (providing extra storage for projects) and a handful of free tier accounts used by surveyors for collecting field data. This is still possible because the new Terms only require that the Mergin account hosting/storing/owning the commercial project has a paid subscription.
For example, consider two users: Fred (who uses a free account) and Penny (who uses a paid account). Penny is permitted to use the project Penny/Survey for commercial purposes as it resides on her paid account. Fred (who uses a free account) is permitted to collaborate on the commercial project Penny/Survey as it resides on Penny’s paid account. However, Fred may not use the project Fred/Survey2 for commercial use as it resides on his free account.
In light of the release of Mergin CE, we feel it is fair to encourage those using Mergin Cloud’s free tier for commercial gain to support us with one of our affordable subscriptions. The link also has a number of frequently asked questions relating to this change.
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Mergin Maps, a field data collection app based on QGIS. Mergin Maps makes field work easy with its simple interface and cloud-based sync. Available on Android, iOS and Windows.
