Other GIS Blogs Digest
Believe it or not, there are other GIS blogs out there. Here are a few snippets from three of them:
James Fee reports from the first day of the ESRI Business Partner conference in Palm Springs:
“Jack [Dangermond] says Microsoft and Google are the key to collaborative GIS using ArcGIS Server as the back-end. The hope is ArcGIS will integrate with everything moving forward.”
Ed.: It appears that Jack is betting the farm on ArcGIS Server…
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A commenter who goes by ‘appliedmaps’ speculates about ESRI’s future on the UK ArchaeoGeek:
“Jack’s been running the company since its beginning (longer than Bill Gates ran Microsoft) and someday he’ll retire or be gone. AFAIK, there’s no order of succession within the company. When Jack leaves, there’ll be a power struggle, some factions wanting to sell out to Oracle or somebody, some factions wanting to go public, etc. What you can be sure of is that the entire product line (which, let’s face it, is based on 10-year old technologies with a bit of surface polish) will shift.”
Ed.: While we don’t normally lend support to anonymous opinions, this one is very much in line with our own thinking. We are also impressed with the rare proper use of apostrophes throughout the entire post.
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Christopher Schmidt tells us Why Open Source Matters:
“This is why Open Source software is so important. So you think you have a stable relationship with your vendor? Maybe you think that you’ve come to a great licensing agreement that you’re happy with? Remember that so long as you’re working in an environment where someone else controls the tools you use, you’re not able to make your own rules.”
Ed.: But let’s not forget, as John Cowan reminds us, that the licensor even of open-source software is still the sovereign owner of the code, and could revoke the license.
Posted by Atanas Entchev at 3/17/2008 1:40 PM 
Categories: Open Source, blog, Technology, Opinion, Microsoft, GIS, Software, Virtual Earth, Business, ESRI, ArcGIS, Google
Tags: Open Source blog Technology Opinion Microsoft GIS Software Virtual Earth Business ESRI ArcGIS Google
Categories: Open Source, blog, Technology, Opinion, Microsoft, GIS, Software, Virtual Earth, Business, ESRI, ArcGIS, Google
Tags: Open Source blog Technology Opinion Microsoft GIS Software Virtual Earth Business ESRI ArcGIS Google
>But let’s not forget, as John Cowan
>reminds us, that the licensor even of
>open-source software is still the
>sovereign owner of the code, and could
>revoke the license.
This is nonsense. If you get some opensource software (say distributed under the GPL), the only thing the original developer can do is distribute _future_ versions under a proprietary license: No retroactive change allowed. The version you already have will still be GPL licensed and you will have all the rights in the world to enhance it or pay someone else to do it.
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Good riddance regarding ArcIMS. I was only ever exposed to it as an end-user. I heard it was more of a pain to configure than use. Here's hoping some interesting projects come out of using ArcGIS Server with its own web API or feeding Server datasets out as tiles to OpenLayers. Both have serious potential.
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