Ecosystem Changes

The Hangar Off Topic
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Piero has announced the departure of WebODM from under the OpenDroneMap banner to its own independent project. As a project, OpenDroneMap is deeply indebted to Piero’s service over the years, not only as a prodigious developer, but also community member and leader. We will miss him.

OpenDroneMap strives to be the best free and open source photogrammetry platform and community. In the last year, we have recruited a few developers to continue to improve OpenDroneMap, such as Leonardo who joined as a maintainer earlier this year, and others will be announced soon. In short, we have a great team forming to push ahead with the plans we have for this year amidst the challenges of a shifting landscape.

We have a lot to do in order to improve core ODM, as well as build other ways to expand the ecosystem: from accessible drones and flight planners to integrating ODM into different user workflows. Expect lots of questions, conversations, and updates along those axes.

And for clarity, we’ll still be shipping the same desktop installer under a different name, now with more regular upgrades. We did a lot of work these last few months ensure we can do so sustainably. For the time being, expect that the OpenDroneMap installer will be based on the WebODM code base.

The best way to support the project moving forward is through your participation in this forum that has real people eager to talk drones, photogrammetry, and how to make the most of your data.

Primary income for the org is still through the installers that support this small but energetic team of developers, researchers, and community support folks. Donations always welcome as well. Continuous and relatively predictable being easier to plan and build around than large funding amounts infrequently.

As posted before, you can find our budget here. community.opendronemap.org/uploads/short-url/7asUIvoBCjQLkpSDcaYT8lzoOR6.pdf

2025 end of year report is under way here. 2025 EOY Report

We’ve got a lot of high impact work planned for 2026, including Leonardo’s queue of ODM fixes and discussion here What is your biggest pain with ODM / OpenSfM?

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WebODM/ODM and OpenDroneMap/ODM
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Ok smathermather, don’t want to let this thread pass under the hood after 2 days.

You are underlining an important leap in our experience as end users, not involved in direct sw developement, but hopefully in other big picture support issues.

I think I can state that we all had our highs and lows, understand that contribute with a little time, competencies, money, or moral support can be useful to a shared project as well as the fact that that all we have up to now is up to developers effort, which hopefully had a return that was not only economic, with all the transparency and reliability needed by reliable people, that no one doubts.

All I wish at the end is a perspective of what we are facing, maybe the architecture of the decoupling is clear and straight for developers but should not be so negligible to specify a little about what the different roads are becoming in an end user perspective.

ciao

luca

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Hi Luca,

In the short term, I wouldn’t anticipate much impact as a user. In the mid-term, I think we’ll have more choices in the broader ecosystem of free and open source photogrammetry tools. The tools we build may drift apart from the tools that Piero builds in his ecosystem, though I imagine we’ll continue to learn from each other.

We’ll still be here on the forum with great support from @saijin_naib and myself, plus all the other great folks here who make this such a supportive community.

Now that the team at OpenDroneMap.org has grown beyond just the two of us, @dodgyspaniard will dive in more deeply on improving the backend photogrammetry tools (ensuring better data outputs). Michael Johnson, who will introduce himself soon, comes from robotics and CI / CD – or the tools that help us build tools. And they both have talents beyond those competencies.

Expect that in addition to Michael and Leonardo, we have a couple more developers who will be joining on the user interface side to make the things you interact with directly more useful for your workflows.

In short, I would expect that this will help trigger a lot of great development that will benefit the folks already here. We’ve got a fantastic team, larger and with greater depth and breadth than we’ve ever had in the project before. I’m really excited about what we’re building.

As a good friend of mine is fond of saying at the end of emails: “Onward!”

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