[Freegis-list] Defending the FreeGIS concept

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 09:26:03AM -0500, Michael C Dietze wrote:
> I am relatively new to this list (been reading for a couple months and
> this is my first post) 

Welcome!

> but I have been continually suprised by the amount
> of energy spent defending the _concept_ of free GIS, the current thread on
> ESRI's investment (charity?) in the third world being just one example.

For the time I've made the experience that knowledge about Free Software
and its philosophy is not commonly spread even with people being
in the Free Software camp.

Sometimes people here take the opportunity to repeat 
and somehow teach what we already know. 
For a list that continues to grow in size (574 members as I type)
with new members this seems appropriate to me.

We somehow try to keep the overview about the Free GIS subject
with this list thus advocay is naturally also on-topic.
In the particular case Jan-Oliver crossposted,
he just wanted to show how the proprietary software mechanisms work
and make people depend on them. 
It really helps the cause of this list if we do shed light
on the long term implications a decision for or against Free Software has
in more cases.

> For example, Mr. Longhorn's contranst between OpenOffice and GRASS really
> resonated with me and points to what I find to be one of the major
> challenges of Free GIS, which is accessability.  I, like Adrian, am and
> ecologist, and my university trains ~100 students a year in GIS as part of
> a "masters of environmental management" program which has an incredible
> job placement rate, including a substantial chunk into non-profit
> conservation organizations.  They train exclusively in ESRI products.
> How the non-profits these students go to work for are expected to afford
> ARC is beyond me.  Even I, in my conceptual support of Free GIS do most of
> my GIS work on Arc even though I do the vast majority of the rest of my
> research from a Linux box...I was trained in Arc and haven't had the time
> and energy to tackle what appears to be a very steep learning curve for
> GRASS.  The question I have is how do we reach people like this, people
> like me, people like Mr. Longhorn?  Telling them to hire a consultant
> isn't an answer that resonates with me.

I see the point, but to me this also demonstrates 
why we have to think about the concept of Free Software.
Mr. Longhorn decided by what seem to be practical value.
His freedom regarding to this software 
was not majorly important for his decision.
(This by the way is a significant to tell people from the
Free Software movement and Open Source movement apart.)

It might be that the current Free Software available might not be
the most practical today. If we value the freedom and community there is
an incentive to help improving it until it serves our needs.

You could try to help us with GRASS or other Free GIS packages.
Actually I believe that GRASS continiously improved over the last two years.
It has a tcl/tk GUI which is not brilliant, but provides
a good start beyond the command line and for starting users.
GRASS 5.0 was a milestone release. The first major release not 
based on work of the original team from the US military.
[Disclosure: I'm involved in GRASS' development.]

We had two interns here at Intevation in the last two years
who we taught GRASS and who were able to do complex GIS tasks.

> 1) detectable - i.e. the various options and tools should be easy to find
> by someone looking for them.  A new user shouldn't have to invest huge
> amounts of research time into finding what they need.  While that time is
> justified for a long-term large-scale project, it's not for the beginner
> and there's no reason to make it hard for the advanced user.
> 
> 2) intuitive - anyone who is familiar with using computer GUIs, and in
> particular anyone trained in another GIS, should be able to make a basic
> map without having to read the manual, without having to memorize hundreds
> to thousands of commands, and without writing any code.
> 
> 3) cross-platform
> 
> 4) migratable - no one wants a piece of software that requires them to
> throw out all their old work/data.

To quite some extend GRASS already fits this criterias.
There is one bigger learning step at the beginning of using GRASS:
How to make a location. 
Also GRASS is a real GIS, not a cartography tool.
It is not about interactive map making, but about analysis.
All analysis tool I saw were complex.
So GRASS is not the answer of all GIS needs.

Still it is a commonly cited example, because
it is very powerful and some users believe it is the most
powerful tool for their tasks.

As for making maps sketch can be a bare-bones tool,
if you have the vector data available allready.
iGmt also is useful though with a different twist.

For general interactive viewing many smaller projects exist,
to name a few: OpenMap, OSSIM, Thuban, QGIS, OpenEV
Some of them are already advanced and all of them wait
to really get discovered by more (GIS) developers and users.

> 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.

There are many more specialised lists for the various projects.
So the more technical discussions usually are moved there.

If you want to help, get a student to try solving GIS problems
with Free Software. Actually try one, give feedback and in this
way help to improve it.

	Bernhard

-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  

If freegis is useful for you, consider paying for the service:
	http://freegis.org/about-paying.en.html
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