[OSGeo-Discuss] One Lecture on Open Source Geospatial

[Barry Rowlingson]

A colleague who lectures on GIS at the university asked me if I'd give
him some advice on open-source geospatial so he could at least
introduce his third year geography & environmental science
undergraduates to the idea. Thanks to the joy of site licenses the
students get to use ACME Proprietary GIS System without having to
worry about the cost.

So anyway, I offered to teach the lecture for him. What can I do in 50
minutes (and possibly a workshop) for 90 undergraduates? Here's a
brain dump:

 Compare and contrast: Free/Open/Proprietary/Closed/Commercial.
Copyright/Licensing/GPL/Copyleft etc.

 Open Standards: formation and importance - talk about the OGC,
general goodness of interoperability

 Open source development advantages/perceived disadvantages and
rejoinders to those.

 Commercialising Open Source, open source in industry.

 Open Source in Education - reproducible science, 'climategate' as a
failure of openness?

 Case Studies: Open source in government - global deployments as case studies

 Open source in the UK:  Ordnance Survey/Met Office case studies

- thats probably enough for 50 minutes. If I can do a workshop I'd
probably just get them to boot up OSGeo Live and play with QGIS for an
hour, maybe try and duplicate one of their GIS exercises from an
earlier module (load layers, buffer, overlay, report...).

Any thoughts?

Barry