Spatial Galaxy

I’ve had to lower my expectations of the Open Source GIS user community. Now that I have your attention, I’ll explain. The OSGIS user community by and large is composed of a great bunch of folks. Its the few that have soured my outlook a bit. I repeatedly see posts to mailing lists blasting one application or the other (usually not to the project’s own list but another). The software stinks, doesn’t work right, the developers are stupid, its not as good as X, Y, or Z, and so forth.

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How can we make getting started in Open Source GIS easier? To begin with, it needs to be easier to

1. Discover
2. Install
3. Use

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In this day of GUI GIS, sometimes you can’t beat the good old command line for getting a job done, regardless of whether you use Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, or Windows. This may sound strange coming from someone heavily invested in a GUI project but its true. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the often overlooked support mechanisms for Open Source GIS applications is Internet Relay chat, better known as IRC. Many OS GIS projects maintain an IRC presence. Often times you will find the project developers hanging out on the channel and willing to answer questions (more about that in a bit). Speaking personally, the Quantum GIS project has used IRC for project coordination, communication, and user support for several years.

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The MapServer Technical Steering Committee today approved an RFC that calls for MapServer to join the newly formed Open Source Geospatial Foundation. A poll has been put up on the MapServer site (login required) to collect the responses from the community.

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This is an unofficial recap of the OSGF meeting, based on my recollections having spent 10 hours on IRC and the phone. I’m sure the foundation will release an official version of the day’s events, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

As I stated in an earlier post, the name was chosen early on and without an excessive amount of debate. OSGF rolls off the tongue rather easily and has a nice ring to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I have been participating in the “GeoFoundation” Meeting since 5:30 am local time this morning. We’re two hours into the meeting and so far a name for the foundation has been agreed upon:
Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

The domain osgeo.org has been registered. I suppose most folks will refer to it as OSGF from this point on, although the term OsGeo was also mentioned in the discussions.

I was concerned that the name of the foundation would become a major stumbling block in making progress during the meeting, however the groundwork and informal polll seems to have paid off in that regard.

Discussion of benefits and expectations has gone around the table and input is being solicited from those participating by IRC.

You can view the IRC transcript at http://logs.qgis.org/geofoundation

Pictures of the event can be found at http://www1.mapserverfoundation.org/chicago-pics/images.html