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Open Source GIS Conference Wrapup

Posted by timothy on from the couldn't-find-it-in-time-to-announce dept.

Wugger writes "The open source GIS community has been around for a long time, but has only been meeting regularly for the past three years. The most recent conference wrapped up on the weekend in Minneapolis. An excellent summary article and blog postings are available from Directions Magazine. Other attendees have also posted blogs and observations. The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year) and all the major open source GIS hackers were in attendance. In addition, some proprietary corporate players showed up to check out the scene: Autodesk, ERMapper, and ESRI, the Microsoft of the GIS industry."

2 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Harsh by facelessnumber · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well... It is a good analogy though. They're the biggest, most widely-adopted vendor of GIS software, they're all about vendor lock-in, they adore the "upgrade treadmill" (Anyone ever use ArcInfo 8.x? How long?) and their software is not just buggy, but buggy in a very special way with its nearly unique capacity to infuriate the user, perhaps dare I say, even surpassing that of Microsoft. At least Microsoft's horrorshow improves with each new release. ESRI's just gets different. Features come before bugfixes. Service packs break things. And such conspicuous placement of duct tape. In some ways they're even worse than Microsoft. Their 16-bit ten year old hack ArcView 3.x is still in heavy use because there are things it can do that either can't be done in Arc8/9 or the UI has changed so radically that people just don't know how. And don't mistake that statement to mean that Arc3 is any less buggy, just that it can be more functional. Imagine WinXP, 2000, and 9x all sucking so badly that you had to dual-boot into Windows 3.1 to get any work done.

    That is why ESRI sucks.

    -An ESRI user.

  2. Summary fails to mention primary open source GIS. by theapodan · · Score: 3, Informative

    GRASS http://grass.itc.it/ is the primary open source GIS solution. The summary could have at least mentioned it in passing.

    Odd that they mention AutoDesk too, considering their mapping software doesn't feature as nice spatial analysis stuff as ArcGIS does, although I haven't used it enough to make any other conclusions about it.

    Now if GRASS would only improve their text interface and revamp their GUI.

    Another critical open source GIS application for webmaps is MapServer http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/

    I've found that doing the data analysis with ArcGIS and displaying it with mapserver is the only way to go. ArcIMS is a bit too complex, at least compared to mapserver.