Saturday, June 07, 2003

Someone took special care of buying the beer for the mapserver conference.  It was all from local brewers and all very decent.  I drank several really fast on an empty stomach and found myself telling someone from Arcata, California how much I loved the police log on the Arcata Eye and then later asking someone from South Carolina if he was related to "Bitchy Little Melvin Purvis"   Then I yelled at the "father of Mapserver" for not having provided budweiser and gave no indication that I was just kidding around.  Then I said, "my work here is done" and went home. 9:53:57 PM    comment []

Theme from mapserver conference at U of M: I talked to several people from various governmental organizations and schools who are struggling under expensive ESRI and Oracle licenses. They are looking at open source products to replace some commercial software.  They often run into barriers, sometimes from management uncomfortable with backing "weird open source products", sometimes from coworkers wedded to a brand of technology.  The latter was hard to overcome because some organizations have large GIS departments that have invested heavily in ESRI and don't want to turn away from an industry standard like ESRI's ARCIMS.    A another type of resistance is from the higher ups who have made the determination never to do any development in house, to not compete with the software industry, and to only buy out of the box solutions.   Those with tin foil caps might surmise, as I do, that the software industry has leaned on government agencies to clamp down on open source wackos funded by the government releasing high quality software for free that competes with expensive software made by campaign contributors. I can see the other side, that a bureaucrat would be afraid of being punished if it were found out that his people were working on open source software that wasn't central to the mission of the organization and that the agency would be spending resources supporting this software.  6:18:32 PM    comment []

I am at the first annual mapserver conference. Just finished the phpmapscript workshop. Mapserver has been bubbling away for several years, enjoyed by many, but has not yet hit the mainstream programmer world. After this conference, I get the feeling that it is about to bust out and become one of the major open source projects, one of those "the world is new" applications that lets web programmers do things they would otherwise only be able to do by spending $10,000 on a seat for ArcIMS. The GIS people have been saying over and over again the message I have only recently understood: GIS gives you views of data that offer insights that are not immediately obvious from other views. The prime example is Snow's Cholera Map (http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/snow/snow.html) where a big medical discovery was made by looking at spatial (map) data instead of the usual chart data. 6:18:30 PM    comment []