[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS & UMN MapServer Training

[Howard Butler]

On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
> If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into  
> the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra  
> credibility and marketing reach.

Why?  Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the  
public domain and give them away for free for "extra credibility"?   
What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an  
intensive training session?  IMO, what OTG is doing is a very  
classical business model of Open Source development.  Publishers like  
O'Reilly, Apress, Springer or our own FOSS4G event workshops (did you  
know FOSS4G cleared 100k this year? ;) ) follow this exact model.

The fact that OTG sees an opportunity to do this and has put forth  
effort in developing materials is a signal there's a market there and  
it is an indirect measurement of those projects' success -- not a  
failure of the projects' documentation efforts.  Not everyone has the  
time to go learn all of this stuff on their own or the ability to  
travel to FOSS4G and hope one of the workshops covers what they need.   
I applaud OTG for developing a curriculum and providing training  
services to serve this market, and I think the osgeo-discuss is a  
perfect place for an announcement like this.

Howard