Guest on 2D Is Against My Religion

Danny Williams

Cesium team at Bentley Systems, Cesium

Danny Williams worked at Epic Games when it acquired the RealityCapture company, then joined Cesium, the open source 3D geospatial platform, before Bentley Systems acquired it. On 2DIAMR, recorded live at INTERGEO 2026, Danny Williams talked about open source as a sales funnel, why Bentley buys instead of builds, the E365 license and a new mobile reality capture app.

Episode

18 min

Expo & conference podcast

Cesium open source: why giving it away became the sales funnel – Danny Williams, Cesium (Bentley Systems)

Danny Williams · Cesium29 Oct 2026

In Danny’s words

“Tons of people use our open source product, but it's also a funnel into our commercial offerings.”

Listen at 2:50 · Cesium open source: why giving it away became the sales funnel – Danny Williams, Cesium (Bentley Systems)

“The catalog of software tools that Bentley owns is in the hundreds.”

Listen at 7:52 · Cesium open source: why giving it away became the sales funnel – Danny Williams, Cesium (Bentley Systems)

“If you're starting from scratch, a lot of times you're behind the curve because there's somebody else that's already taken the time to specialize in it.”

Listen at 10:32 · Cesium open source: why giving it away became the sales funnel – Danny Williams, Cesium (Bentley Systems)

Quoted in our tech guides

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“To have a common environment within which all of this disparate data can come in and be utilized across the life cycle of a project.”▶ 11:12

Questions Danny answered

Why is Cesium open source?: According to Danny Williams, Patrick Cozzi insisted on open source when Cesium spun out of AGI; the open source product is widely adopted and works as a funnel into Cesium's commercial offerings. ▶ 2:24
Is Cesium still open source after the Bentley acquisition?: Yes, according to Danny Williams: Bentley were big proponents of continuing the open source model, and Patrick Cozzi sees it as an important part of Cesium's ethos alongside commercial products. ▶ 5:02
How many software products does Bentley Systems have?: According to Danny Williams, the catalog of software tools Bentley owns is in the hundreds, many of them from acquisitions of niche specialists. ▶ 7:52
What is Bentley E365?: According to Danny Williams, E365 is a Bentley license format that gives a firm access to the whole software catalog, with the cost based on consumption. ▶ 11:42
What is iTwin Capture?: According to Danny Williams, iTwin Capture is the former ContextCapture, rebranded; it takes LiDAR scans, photogrammetry and other reality capture data and outputs a Gaussian splat or a 3D mesh. ▶ 12:56

Talks about

Olli Huttunen – 3D Gaussian Splatting creator
Arek Szadkowski – Global Lead, ArcGIS Reality, Esri
Tomáš Barnáš – Co-founder of LumiSway and Overhead4D; producer of Smithsonian Starstruck, Overhead4D
Elliott Mizroch – Director, Smithsonian Starstruck
Barry Bassnett – Digital twin practitioner, author of Tower of Twins
Nikhil Sawlani – Founder, MultiSet AI