[Freegis-list] Conference Speech

[Amaury Jacquot]

On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 17:06, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 06:00:57PM -0500, Martin, Daniel wrote:
> > For a server, my suggestion would be MapServer, http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu
> > .  If the colo server has PHP support, then MapServer with the recently
> > released MapLab http://www.dmsolutions.on.ca/maplab.html might be what you
> > have in mind - although I must admit haven't tried MapLab out myself.  I do
> > use MapServer often and extensively though.
> > 
> > Both MapServer and MapLab (which depends on MapServer) are free open source
> > products.
> 
> Let me add that they are indeed Free Software.
> You will need some effort (work or costs in commercial terms) 
> in setting them up, thus "free open source" is a bit missleading.

The Free in this context is not free as in beer, but as in freedom.
You can copy the software, muck with it as you want, and your neighbour
can do the same, you can't prevent him to do so, as that would remove
his freedom of mucking with it.

The fact that you have to pay for commercial support is that you don't
pay for the software itself, but for the support. If you have
time/skills to do it yourself, then you don't have to pay anything.

Sincerely

For more info, check http://www.gnu.org

> You can buy commercial support for MapServer at several places.
> Thus it could rightfully be called commercial Free Software...
-- 
Amaury Jacquot <sxpert at esitcom.org>