[OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[G. Allegri]

>
> Libraries and tools that can be used across different OSGEO apps.
>
>

+1, from a software point of view.
I can compare my experience as a user and programmer in the last five years
with OSGeo (and other FOSS tools) against my parallel experience with
ArcGIS, Erdas, Isatis, etc. A very sinthetic resume:

Many people are aware of the potentialities of many OSGeo softwares, thanks
also to foundation libraries like GDAL. The problem is the step from
potential to daily use. I know that ideally everyone could contribute to
higher level features (sponsorship, dev, testing, docs, etc.), but the step
from ideality to practice still keeps many practitioners bound to more
integrated, full featured, softwares (first of all ArcGIS).
I see a main problem to this: FOSS gis still suffers lack of data model and
user experirence consistency. The OS freedom is a coin: one face shows all
the benefits of independent communities, etc. while the other makes it
appear a big confused arena to the most users... I would support more and
more the development and sharing of low level, generic libraries.
algorithms, cartograhpic, but also data structures (I'm working hard to
produce a seemless integration between SAGA and QGis, and the work is
prominently dedicated to this).
This would facilitate the OSGeo software integration and so the building of
full featured products (QGis GUI + GRASS/SAGA algorithms + R analysis + ....
= something more similar to commercial stacks), and would help the
interfacing with the rest of the world.

+1 for OSGeo Edu, and the Journal.

giovanni
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