In a recent post on VerySpatial.com, Jesse was discussing the apparent dominance of U*nix and observed: ‘…the geospatial industry almost completely left behind support for UNIX-like OSes’ It is true that the proprietary GIS vendors have largely abandoned Unix and Unix-like operating systems and continue to do so. However the open source GIS community...
Monthly Archives: January 2010
The Shapefile – Reports of My Deprecation have been Greatly Exaggerated
The death of the shapefile has again been predicted—this time for 2010. The technical description of the format has been around for going on 12 years. In that time it has become a sort of lowest common denominator for data exchange. They’re everywhere. Making them go away is going to require a revolution of...
What’s Holding Back the Adoption of Open Source GIS on the Desktop?
In my last post I created a poll to get an idea of the extent of migration to open source GIS on the desktop. The results indicated that nearly 50% of the people using open source GIS were still using their proprietary software as well. You can view the results of the poll using...