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

[Holger Zebner]

Hello list,
I read the discussion from which these postings derrived with a lot of 
interest.
The use of free or proprietary technology is a good question for both - 
developing and industrialized coutries.
But when we recommend the dev. coutries to use free software we should 
remember that support and updates needed come from the net. But can the 
access the net all the time or can they afford this? In my opinion, the GUI 
needs to be developped a lot more. Consider that you may be working  with 
people who have used the computer just for some years; so the thing should 
be, as early mentioned, intuative in it's use.

Some word on the advocacy/PR matter:

>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.

I am a student in Geography. In our department we get taught all GIS 
knowledge on ESRI (ArcView, ArcMap). there're like telling us that it is 
the only system existing which is quite true when one takes a look at the 
spreading of ESRI. The whole university uses it even though it has known 
problems: the code and programming code (Avenue) is proprietary, it crashes 
often and isn't very comfortable to use. But still they don't think of 
something different than buying the latest licence. Don't they see that 
they have the power of a new generation sitting in their halls.
Only universities can afford to deploy a lot of specialist to develop the 
next generation free GIS tools. They have all the different departments and 
subjects that are needed to bring out something more than a cartographic tool.

I'd like start exploring the free GIS software world but it isn't useful at 
the moment since I will have to present the results in Arc.

I once istalled GRASS 5.0 but simlpy capitulated. It seemed to be suitable 
for specialists performing a raster image research. I think it is not 
really good just some small database-vector-image work like joining or 
intersecting imgaes...

Greetings
Holger




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