[Freegis-list] Free Software GIS suite project?

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 01:15:16PM -0700, Wood Brent wrote:

> There are at least 4 GIS oriented LiveCD's that I'm aware of. They are not
> quite what I envisage, although they do serve a useful purpose. They do,
> however serve as a OS straightjacket. 

Live CD can serve to lower the burden so people can try the software.
Thus they are very important.


> Click to install to hard drive. You can't
> easily install the GIS packages from a LiveCD to your SUSE/Fedora/Debian
> install. Certainly not on Windows, even with Cygwin. So I don't see a live CD
> as a suitable medium for supplying GIS software. Great for
> teaching/demonstrating or GIS "appliances".

Yes, another problem is:

	They can rarely used as bases for commercial delopyment
	(not proprietary Software deployment)
	because the source needs correct handling.

> Commercial GIS products tend to be available as modular products, users
> purchase the modules they require (or can afford :-) 

You have probably ment "proprietary" GIS products.
There are many commercial Free Software GIS products.
http://intevation.de/%7Ejan/infos/dont_oppose_commercial_and_free_software.en.html

> Freegis provides access to the various FOSS GIS packages, but does not attempt
> to bundle them into a suite, which I feel is the next step required to foster
> the use of FOSS GIS & the growth of the FOSS GIS community.

The first step was to make the available Free Software applications
and components known. The FreeGIS project reached that goal successfully.
You are right in that integration should follow.
However that will not happen centralised in my opinion.

We have quite some experience with the FreeGIS CD and
Intevation also produced a FreeGIS CD and learned a bit:
There is not much market to put a lot of effort into the integration
because GIS is still an expert topic which people tend to spend
money differently on.
Building of binaries should better be handled by the distributions
and the individual project. There is a competition going fueling
the motivation. It helps to support both to do this properly
and it seem to be a lot of fine tuning. The Freegis team here
as answered many questions and pushed quite some project
to actually make their code available as Free Software.
This base work will need to be continued on a broader basis.

	Bernhard

-- 
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