[Freegis-list] just free

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:47:34AM -0800, Brian Wilson wrote:
> > > Please refrain from advertising proprietary software on this
> > > list. Almost everywhere people read about non-free software
> > > and this mailinglist is for Free Software only.

> I've been a devoted Linux user since 1992, and look forward one day to
> having a usable (posstibly free) fully featured GIS product based on
> Linux. Until then I will have to continue using ArcMap on Windows.

As other have pointed out: There is very capable Free Software GIS 
running on GNU/Linux, GRASS is among the strongest of them, 
but there is a lot more. 
Many of them also run on other operating systems like FreeBSD
and even proprietary ones.

> As far as I am concerrned if someone wants to announce availability of
> closed-source software that comes with a price tag of "free" on this
> list, I'd say go for it. But it's not my list and I respect the wishes
> of the moderator.

Thanks.

> Many good solutions are lacking in the open source GIS world, and I
> need to know how to solve problems cheaply and quickly even if the
> sources for the solutions are closed.

(The availability of the source is not enough for being Open Source.
I would love to be able to be less careful with the terms,
but there is a potential of missunderstanding with most of them.)

Note that many people on this list believe that 
each time you use non-free software 
even when forced by a certain degree,
you morally do the wrong thing 
in helping to take away freedom for them and the society.

> If anyone knows of another mailing list oriented towards "solutions"
> with a small 's' as in solving problems rather than becoming entangled
> in Free versus free issues, please let me know. 

I can understand the need for pragmatic solutions,
but we can only keep the quality of a list high if we focus the topic.

Also off-topic are deep discussion about Free Software and its terminiology.
Most of this was debated already during the last 20 years
and thus there are much better places to contribute arguments.

If you look in the archive you can see that a lot of pragmatic help
has been given for GIS solutions on freegis-list;
only it was focussed on Free Software.

	Bernhard

-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  
Experts for complex webmapping! In business since 1999:
	http://intevation.net/services/gis/webmapping.en.html
Pay for FreeGIS if you like it: http://freegis.org/about-paying.en.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/attachments/20050105/e0ceb1a9/attachment.bin