[OSGeo-Discuss] Propietary vs. FOSS4GIS round-table in Spain

[Paulo Marcondes]

2007/12/26, Miguel Montesinos <mmontesinos at prodevelop.es>:
> Hi to everybody,
>
> - Alfonso Rubio (Top Manager at ESRI Spain): [2] "from an intellectual point of view, I wonder that if free software is a software with freedom to be modified at any time, that is just the opposite of guaranteeing that we are able to work with standards, because any user, or even any implementation, can modify it"
>
> - A. Rubio (ESRI) in a 2nd talk: [3] "it seems that standard support is less guaranteed with free software from an intellectual point of view"
> and finally: "a standard -in the end- is a boring thing"
>
> - Rubén Andreani (Top Manager at Intergraph Spain): [4] "How much does it cost to make a software and to maintain it? There's a gossip which says that a version of a GIS software costs around 100-200 million $ ... so, obviously the software cannot be free (for *gratis*) because money has to come from anywhere."

wow,

Those guys are really into FUD. However, that is an _old_ FUD that has
been dispelled in the las 5 years due to the enormous success achieved
by free operating systems, and database engines.

Also, ESRI Spain is shooting its own foot, as GDAL/OGR (and PROJ) is
free software and built inside Arc*.

cheers!
-- 
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