[Freegis-list] Re: GIS grant to help map cities worldwide

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 09:26:03AM -0500, Michael C Dietze wrote:
> In a nutshell, I think we need to be thinking about what we need to do to
> COMPETE with ESRI and the like, rather than just preaching the virtues of
> FreeGIS and expecting that to be sufficient to draw users.

the FreeGIS activities aim at spreading the word, collect information
and offer a discussion forum. This is a lot political and PR work.

Companies and spare time developers work on improving the code.
It is a slow process but with visible success.

UMN MapServer is a nice example where Free Software does not
just compete, but already has beaten what ESRI produces.
Other prominent success stories are GRASS, PostGIS and also
base libraries such as shapelib/GDAL/OGR.

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

Intevation GmbH	              	     http://intevation.de/
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