The application was introduced as open-source by Autodesk in November 2005, and the code was contributed to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in March 2006 under the GNU LGPL.
The MapGuide platform can be deployed on Linux or Microsoft Windows, supports Apache and IIS web servers, and offers extensive PHP, .NET, Java, and JavaScript APIs for application development.
To this day MapGuide 6.5 and previous releases are known for ease of deployment, rapid application development, data connectivity, scalability, and overall performance.
In spring 2004 a team of developers at Autodesk began work on what is now MapGuide Open Source.
The project was then submitted to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in March 2006 under the LGPL license.