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| Subject: | Re: GISList: Re: Effective Standards |
| Date: |
04/29/2003 12:40:00 PM |
| From: |
viktoras |
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In general it is so (in the USA).
1) [general issues on the open source]
Please, do not forget GIS community in the rest part of the world.
For our IT businessmen Open Source was and still is the only money and
business saving option. And this is simply because of wild policies of
some companies abroad. Situation as it is in some countries (now future
members of the EU) is ridiculous as BSA (business software alliance
mainly financed by a well known IT giant) has a power to take any
hardware equipment (computers) from any private enterprise where they
find at least one illegal piece of (their) software. Owners are also
fined so that they are unable to raise their IT business again- no
computers, no money- everything has gone (still unclear where ?..)
except debts. Governmental institutions (the biggest illegal software
users couple of years ago) were just ignored. Hundreds if not thousands
of small business enterprises in IT sector bankrupted right after BSA
actions in 2001-2002. I'm not a supporter of a software piracy in any
way nor I am using illegal software in my business. But just imagine
that probably in the bigger part of the world anual incomes of a small
enterprise may be less than your average monthly salary in the US.
Official statistics say that average monthly salary in my country two
years ago was ~300 $. While in reality for the most people it was no
more then 200$. The average one needs to work one year to save enough to
afford a computer (funny, isn't it ?..) How many years that one should
work to afford buying a software that costs twice as much as his
computer... ? Now situation is much better simply because many
enterprises started using Open Source alternatives or writing software
they need by themselves. Paying a salary to an IT specialist was more
cost-effective then buying the product on the market. Nobody forgets
unfair BSA actions and threats as it still has and demonstrates the same
force.
This historicaly caused a situation which we have now. Countries of the
Eastern Europe in these years became suppliers of an IT "work force" for
the Western EU or USA... People were forced to create their own "IT
bicycles" again and again and become skilled in many fields. I think it
was a good example of a "strugle for survival" and an evidence of a
positive influence of "hard to use" Open Source to an entire economics
of a country.
On the other hand those who remained here started getting contracts with
EU enterprises -"ordinary users of MS Office" who were panicaly affraid
to be involved into any programming themselves. Good for us :-). Economy
and salaries in our IT sector skyrocketed.
2) [standards - open source vs. proprietary]
Where would the WWW be if html and xml were not an open but proprietary
standards ?.. I doubt if there was such a usefull thing like Google in
the world and IT sector was worth of such huge attention as it has now.
Many enterprises now get huge profits creating and selling tolls for
such a simple open-standard thing like html...
Human Genome project would have failed without its openness to every
researcher in the world.
Research in Bioinformatics science would be close to imposible if there
were no free (nonocommercial, open source ) access to their huge
databases, algorithms and tools all around the world. Say thanks to Open
Source. Next stage - decoding Human Proteome will be much more difficult
and impossible without its "openness". I do not think GIS is very
different in this way.
My humble opinion is that users always want to have a choice among
alternatives both "proprietary" and "open source". But when we speak
about universal standards, then I can not see other alternatives to open
standards. I can't imagine something becoming a global standard if
somebody wants to get paid each time that "standard" is used or
modified. Briefly- big projects may be commercialised while global
projects (like setting standards, decoding genome, etc..) must be open
if somebody wants to make them accepted world-wide. Otherwise they will
not be able to pass a "red line" between "big" and "global".
Cheers
Viktoras
dar@manifold.net wrote:
>>>Why then isn't the U of Minnesota server the gold standard, used by
>>>all? (Again, just an example...)
>>>
>>>
>>(a) Because it is "just an implementation" not a "reference
>>implementation" which coexisted with the standard.
>>(b) Do not be so quick to assume it will *not* be the gold standard. I
>>don't see any other high performance, zero cost, multiformat rendering
>>engines available out there. WMS support in Mapserver is barely a
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