[OSGeo-Discuss] Proprietary GIS on our OSGeo website

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2017-09-21 8:02 AM, Ben Caradoc-Davies wrote:
> On 21/09/17 19:54, María Arias de Reyna wrote:
>> In fact, publishing blog posts comparing closed and FLOSS is also very
>> helpful. If you are doubting what kind of software to use, a good
>> comparison with table feature comparisons is very handy But that
>> should be outside the project page, because we are not begging for
>> users. We are strong projects on our own, we don't need to keep
>> continuously comparing to the closed alternatives for users to know
>> what we do.
> 
> Uplifting tweet of the week:
> 
> "Jon Kuperman‏ @jkup
> Stop treating open source like a product you purchased and start 
> treating it like a team you belong to."
> https://twitter.com/jkup/status/909887066103676928
> 
> Referring to proprietary GIS on the OSGeo website risks misleading users 
> that OSGeo projects are just competing products. We offer something that 
> proprietary GIS never can: the opportunity to join a community of peers.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 

Thank you Ben, this is absolutely correct: we have an amazing vibrant 
community, and we need a front-end website that fosters and promotes 
OSGeo projects (especially those in OSGeo incubation as well as OSGeo 
Community projects) and OSGeo initiatives such as the Summer of Code. 
Period.  Full stop.  This is what our community is good at, and why we 
are so desired today.  From experience I can tell you that this 
struggle, that is being put forth here, will just separate our community 
(you can see it is already) and make the community weaker.

Let us help our OSGeo community grow.   Don't worry about competing 
organizations (trust me they are fine, they have big money for marketing 
and teams of people working on that), just focus on OSGeo and our 
wonderful community.

I am setting up an OSGeo "Website Management Team" now, to help bring 
the focus on the OSGeo community, manage the website (and WordPress 
theme), security, backups, content etc, and will propose this to OSGeo's 
Systems committee and OSGeo Board; for the longterm maintenance of the 
website.  I imagine during this maintenance process we will be removing 
these unnecessary promotions, and focus on the OSGeo community (us). 
We'll leave promotion of other things for those with the big money ha, 
as they have the big funding for their products, as you mentioned.  We 
will focus on the OSGeo community.

Thanks Ben,

-jeff

-- 
Jeff McKenna
President Emeritus, OSGeo Foundation
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jeff_McKenna