[OSGeo-Discuss] Your open source career

[Landon Blake]

Chris,

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

The opinions of individuals like you that are just migrating to open
source are very valuable. 

The lack of good user documentation is a weakness of many open source
projects. The problem is that most of us like to code, but few of us
like to write! It is something that needs to be addressed, although I am
unsure of the solution. Maybe we need to invent an IDE for user
documentation. :]

Landon

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of ChrisWebster
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 4:13 AM
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Your open source career


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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