[Intevation News] FreeGIS CD: Mission accomplished!

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

FreeGIS CD: Mission accomplished!

"To offer and promote Free Software alternatives
for proprietary Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and geographic data."
that was the mission statement of the FreeGIS CD in 1999, when starting out.

Between then and 2003 twelve editions of the FreeGIS CD got published,
containing ready made packages for popular GNU/Linux distributions
like RedHat, Debian, SuSE and Mandrake.

Since around 2004 most of the Free GIS Software projects
offer binary installers for various platforms right on their homepages.
The distributions also have integrated some GIS packages
and the Internet got faster with more people having direct access.
Not to forget the increasing number of some famous GIS Live-CDs.

"Now its time to officially close this sub project of FreeGIS.org.
It has accomplished its goal!" says Jan-Oliver Wagner,
co-founder of the FreeGIS project.
A couple of thousand copies of the CDs have been distributed in
the early days of Free GIS Software,
the number of subsequent copies is probably even higher.

The FreeGIS CD team thanks all the direct and indirect supporters.

However, a version 2.0 might still happen eventually.
It likely will be a Live-CD with a new mission
addressing today's and tomorrow's needs for promoting Free GIS Software.
"We already have some ideas and volunteering team, but there is no hurry",
Jan-Oliver Wagner explains.

The FreeGIS Web Portal and the FreeGIS Mailing List continue to be popular,
even drawing more attention. The FreeGIS team has created a comprehensive
entry point into using Free Software in processing geographic information
and it is likely to stay this way.