[OSGeo-Discuss] Your open source career

[ChrisWebster]

Fascinating discussion - and quite encouraging to someone like me who is just
moving into GIS and hoping to make good use of OS GIS tools in future.

As a newbie to all of this technology, I'd go along with the general feeling
that ESRI ArcMap is easier to get started with as an end user, and often far
more sophisticated, than what I've seen of most OS GIS clients.  But for
that kind of money, I'd expect something pretty good.  And proprietary
systems are not always that great e.g. MapInfo seems to have better DB
integration than Arc*, but its cartography tools are nowhere near as good,
at least as far as I can tell.  And my ArcDesktop client still falls over
all the time, especially when I run it on Vista.

>From what I've seen on the server side, OS can give ESRI a run for its
money, although integration still requires some work.  But I don't see any
real reason why I would want to use e.g. ArcSDE + SQLServer, for example,
when I could use PostGIS and things like MapServer or GeoServer or Safe FME
to help de-couple the database from my client software.  Provided my client
can talk to non-ESRI interfaces and I'm not already locked into Arc*, of
course.  And this old software lock-in approach still seems to dominate the
world of ESRI, while much of the outside world is moving to de-coupled 3
tier apps.

I guess I'd still want to be able to use big GIS clients like ArcMap for
some work, but I'm not sure every GIS application really needs this kind of
expensive artillery.  Sometimes a nifty little web map will tell the
customer all they need to know.

The biggest problem with OS - nobody seems to have mentioned it yet - is the
lack of user-friendly or coherent documentation, even for mature tools like
GRASS (yes, I know there's a GRASS book, but getting hold of it is like one
of the more arduous treks in Lord Of The Rings...).  The forums are a great
source of expert help (thanks, guys!), and there are lots of tutorials
scattered around the web, but sometimes it's a real relief for this newbie
to relax into the warm bath of an ESRI Virtual Campus training course or
even an old-fashioned paper manual (they're called "books" for you younger
people out there).  

But what do I know?  I'm only just starting my Open Source Career ;-))

Chris

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