[OSGeo_discuss] Fwd: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS GIS in India

[H.S.Rai]

On 8/11/07, Arup Dasgupta <arup at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> No body wants to touch OSS because it is perceived to be a nerd thing/
> not useful/ not maintainable/etc.

Can there be possibility of following for perceiving such things:

a) Lack of confidence/competency
b) Getting few events sponsored from vendors
c) co mission

http://gis.nic.in/infrastructure.html shows proprietary software and
in house developed software. Nowhere there is mention of GRASS and
other FOSS GIS software.

There is another effort in India GRAM++

http://www.csre.iitb.ac.in/gram++/Grampp_GIS.htm

and there may be more such efforts (including NIC's), but problem is
they are neither co-ordinating among themselves, nor their products
are FREE and / or Opensource. We just want to use FOSS software at the
most, but don't release our own developed software as FOSS. So we
unable make use of benefits of FOSS.

> efforts. You can ask Dadhwal what happened to ISROGIS, ISROVISION,
> SIPS and GeoSpace.

If ISRO, NIC, IITB and other such organisations join hands and try to
use and refine existing FOSS software, then things can change
dramatically, India can save billions of rupees, but at at the cost of
loss to software vendors ;-)

-- 
H.S.Rai
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