Why is this going to succeed when something like Geogig never took off? I was super interested in the project at the time of its initial release but it’s been dead for years. What did that project fundamentally do wrong vs what Kart is doing? Or is it just a super niche thing?
Having worked on a Geogig-as-a-Service proof-of-concept for a moment in time, the problems there were: no way to see commits and changes on a map (GitHub's later addition of a GeoJSON view and diff map being the final knell), and no server to host your repos (i.e. you would host your own Java/Maven server). The word was that a big government or military customer wanted this technology and didn't need any of that consumer-facing stuff, so the open source aspect was more of a "let's see if it catches on".
My project never took off because it was my first cloud and Maven project, but it was fun to tinker with the idea until GitHub got around to its GeoJSON stuff.
This is a great question, and one of the first things we had to answer before deciding to build Kart. These are my top 3:
1. We found Geogig hard to get running. I'm a software engineer but I struggled to get Geogig installed correctly. Typical GIS people are technical, but maybe not in command lines or building software. Kart is designed to be 'batteries included', installs easily on Windows, Mac and Linux.
2. Geogig was "inspired by" git, but isn't built "on top of" git. That meant rebuilding a lot of things that git is already _really_ good at. Kart teaches git how to work with spatial data, so we're getting all of the benefits of many thousands of human-hours in optimizations in git. It also means a lot of git tooling works with kart today, leaving us free to focus on GIS-specific enhancements. There are a few specific examples of later additions to git, like git filters, that have made critical features possible (e.g. spatially filtered clones).
3. Geogig was a great project largely sponsored by Boundless Geo before they got bought by Planet, and it more-or-less died at that point. Ultimately, these projects have a big bootstrapping problem. You need data, the tool, and willing users. Kart is sponsored by Koordinates.com - a platform that's been doing GIS data delivery for over 10 years. We have a lot of data that we're been 'mirroring' into Repos and will make avaiable soon, we have a lot of users with specific use cases (fetching updates to large, regularly updated datasets) who are already using it, and we're making a long term committement to Kart as an OS project.
