Autodesk, makers of AutoCad, have announced a partnership with the University of Minnesota to develop and enhance web mapping servers and service platforms and release them as Open Source.

The new effort, hosted at www.mapserverfoundation.org, is called the MapServer foundation (after the University of Minnesota's MapServer project, presumedly, where the Enterprise version was born).

Among the things that the enterprise version appears to support is the ability to modify feature data objects on the server, which would be a great step for open-source offerings.