The original GeoTools 1.0 codebase was the work of only two main developers - James Macgill and Ian Turton of Leeds University. As the project grew in complexity and in popularity it became clear that further development was becoming unsustainable: partly because so few people were involved in the design process and partly because the code had evolved rather randomly. It was time for a clean start with a better design and a larger development community.

The second generation of GeoTools has been fundamentally redesigned to take advantage of the full power of the Java platform. GeoTools is contributed to by an international group of developers and is run in as decentralized a manner as possible. Because of this, GeoTools strives to cooperate with other efforts, to modularize the decision making process, and to foster an open community.

In 2002, code from the SEAGIS project was merged into the geotools 2.0 project, providing coordinate transformation services, grid coverage and rendering implementations.

The overall maintenance and future directions of GeoTools 2 is managed by the GeoTools 2 Project Management Committee (PMC). Currently this comprises 8 active developers who take joint responsibility for design and implementation decisions. The team welcomes and encourages others to become contributors and ultimately become part of the GeoTools 2 development team.

It is a long term goal of the GeoTools 2 project to refine its core API and promote its use so that it can become a recognized and standard API for Java GeoSpatial development.