[OSGeo-Discuss] ESRI Spain conference incident

[Mark Lucas]

ESRI has a history of tightly controlling its conferences.  I've  
attended the paid conference in San Diego on several occasions and  
have had papers turned down with no explanation.  It was obvious that  
someone considered the topic competitive to ESRI products.  Even when  
the papers were written emphasizing how software worked with ESRI  
solutions - it was obvious that they considered it competition and  
turned it down.

There is always a silver lining.  Obviously, gvSig has risen to the  
point that it is considered a threat to ESRI products and sales.  Keep  
up the good work!

Finally, it is refreshing to notice the contrast between proprietary  
conferences and open source events - aggressive competition and  
criticism of other products vs collaboration.

Mark


On Oct 17, 2008, at 4:09 AM, Lester Caine wrote:

> Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas wrote:
>> The ESRI user conference is gratis, but you need to register yourself
>> and receive confirmation of the organisation. Some of that people  
>> went
>> to Madrid from Valencia, so they lost (or not, it depends how you see
>> that) their work day and that's money of course.
>
> I certainly would still have kicked up a stink to get back the cost  
> of travelling over 200 miles ;)
> Heck - I think they should do that anyway?
> The organisers had obviously decided beforehand to exclude these  
> people so it WOULD have been polite to save them cost of travelling  
> BUT they obviously decided simply to annoy? It certainly does not  
> earn ESRI any 'brownie points' being so arrogant, but then again  
> their lawyers have probably sown up every loose end in the small  
> print so they will just have to put up with bad press :)
>
> -- 
> Lester Caine - G8HFL
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Mark Lucas
Principal Scientist