What is FWTools and OGR GDAL?
FWTools GIS Toolkit is a freely available open source toolkit for Windows and Linux that can do more than GIS tricks.
It is a precompiled bundle of Open Source GIS tools.
The FW comes from the initials of Frank Warmerdam,
the originator of the toolkit and current President of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO).
One key component of the GIS Toolkit is the GDAL/OGR library. Parts of the library have been enhanced by several in the OSGEO community.
GDAL is a basic foundation of countless Open source GIS as well as commercial GIS applications. Here are
Listings of commercial and open source software
that use it and GDAL sponsors.
This is a library which historically has been developed and maintained by Frank Warmerdam, but has started to garner quite a few developers.
GDAL is X/MIT licensed (similar to BSD license), therefore the licensing is very generous for commercial use. The toolkit can be downloaded from
http://fwtools.maptools.org/
