[Geo4All] [geoforall-ab] Ideas invited from "Geo for All" community for Global Week to help demonstrate and raise awareness of "geo" in education at UNESCO

Fri Sep 23 02:14:55 PDT 2016

Dear All,

Geo4All does not have a Pro version. Our focus is education and we are fully free and open . We don't exclude anyone.

One of the important things i learnt during  my lectures to students in universities worldwide (from USA to India), is that the digital natives are very smart. They have a very global outlook and are keen to contribute to building a better world for everyone . I remember talking to a student and asking her what GIS software she uses and her reply was “We use all different platforms to learn GIS but noone can trick us to  pay to buy GIS software when there is lot of free and open software now available” . I really liked this reply. This empowerment of students is exactly what we want.

This is 2016 not 1996! It is now not possible for any vendor (however big) to create monopolies in education. We now have so many fully free and open alternatives in place for each needs (from desktop GIS to web mapping)  that staff and students can choose as they want. It is upto colleagues to decide which tools they want to use.

For education, it is very important that free and open tools are used for long term sustainability and true empowerment.

Best wishes,

Suchith

________________________________________
From: GeoForAll <geoforall-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> on behalf of Venka <venka.osgeo at gmail.com>
Sent: 23 September 2016 8:13 AM
To: geoforall at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Geo4All] [geoforall-ab] Ideas invited from "Geo for All" community for Global Week to help demonstrate and raise awareness of "geo" in education at UNESCO

As far as the OSGeo projects are concerned,
as noted in [1], the foundation's projects are all
freely available and useable under an Open Source
Initiative certified [2] open source license.

As you can see in [2] Apache License 2.0 is
one of the most popular among the licenses
certified by OSI.

Cesium itself is available under Apache 2.0 license
[3] and I see no issue in using it in OSGeo related
software development and outreach activities.

Infact, there were several interesting presentations
based on Cesium at the recent FOSS4G-Bonn [4]

[1] http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html
[2] https://opensource.org/licenses/
[3] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/blob/master/LICENSE.md
[4] https://cesiumjs.org/2016/08/05/Cesium-at-FOSS4G-2016/

Best

Venka

On 2016/09/23 15:56, Antoni Pérez Navarro wrote:
> Wonderful e-mail!
> I will print it and put it in my office door.
> Geo4All does not have a Pro version!
>
> Enviat des del meu Smartphone. Disculpeu la brevetat.
>
> El dia 23/09/2016 2:26, "Hogan, Patrick (ARC-PX)" <patrick.hogan at nasa.gov>
> va escriure:
>
>> AGI provides a ‘Pro” version of Cesium for a reason.
>>
>>
>>
>> It is not for Open Source, it is for profit. Why else would it be $35K per
>> seat?
>>
>>
>>
>> We want a place where open source services a world into nirvana, and not
>> short-circuit us into somebody’s pocket. The only reason NASA WorldWind
>> exists is for a world to fall in love with itself and charge nothing for
>> the best of that.
>>
>>
>>
>> Geo4All does not have a ‘Pro’ version. The very best needs to belong to
>> all of us. Please wake up and smell the coffee! You are either open all the
>> way or you are servicing a lesser interpretation of the Geo4All musketeer’s
>> mantra, “All for one and one for all!”
>>
>>
>>
>> Cesium, you are either open or you are Pro version ahead. There are no two
>> ways to play this game, no matter how discreetly you dissect it.
>>
>>
>>
>> -Patrick
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* GeoForAll [mailto:geoforall-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] *On Behalf
>> Of *Cozzi, Patrick
>> *Sent:* Monday, August 15, 2016 4:24 PM
>> *To:* geoforall at lists.osgeo.org
>> *Subject:* Re: [Geo4All] [geoforall-ab] Ideas invited from "Geo for All"
>> community for Global Week to help demonstrate and raise awareness of "geo"
>> in education at UNESCO
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>>
>>
>> As an educator and open-source geospatial developer, I admire the
>> principles of Geo4All.
>>
>>
>>
>> At the University of Pennsylvania, all of my course projects are
>> open-source; I mentor projects and speak in Penn's open-source software
>> development course; and I advise independent study projects that produce
>> useful open-source software [1].  I also serve on conference committees
>> such as FOSS4G NA and FedGeoDay.
>>
>>
>>
>> At AGI, I started Cesium and open-source development in general, and
>> continue to lead these efforts.  There's some misinformation about Cesium
>> in this thread that I would like to clear up.
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. Cesium is truly open-source as defined by the Open Source Initiative
>> [2].  Cesium uses the Apache 2.0 license (an OSI approved license [3]),
>> follows the Contributor Covenant's Code of Conduct [4], has dozens of
>> contributors not employed by AGI [5], has public roadmap discussions where
>> everyone is encouraged to participate [6], strictly follows Contributor
>> License Agreements [7], has tons of documentation to create an inclusive
>> community for new users and contributors [8, 9], and is considered by many
>> to be an open-source community success story [10].
>>
>>
>>
>> 2. In addition to creating a genuinely useful software project that has,
>> for example, proved to be a successful successor to Google Earth [11] and
>> widely used at NASA (search for "NASA" in [12]), the Cesium team is now
>> creating an ecosystem including open formats to move the 3D geospatial
>> field forward without vendor lock-in.  These formats include glTF for
>> efficient 3D models [13], an open standard that we created as part of The
>> Khronos Group (who also maintain WebGL, OpenGL, COLLADA, etc), and 3D Tiles
>> for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets [14].  We've
>> fostered these formats in openness by having spec development, editing, and
>> discussion in GitHub repos.
>>
>>
>>
>> 3. The existence of a Cesium Pro version does not imply that open-source
>> Cesium is a distant second.  Cesium Pro could more literally be named
>> "Cesium with niche aerospace features."  It serves a narrow market that
>> creates funding for the sustainability and rapid development of the broad
>> open-source Cesium.  AGI is passionately supporting open-source Cesium for
>> the long-haul as all our new initiatives are built on it.  We would, for
>> example, never make the core terrain and imagery engine faster in Cesium
>> Pro, but not open-source Cesium.  The tangled fork alone would be too much
>> work to maintain.  Open-source Cesium will remain first rate and use only
>> open formats so, for example, data sources can come from any vendor, with
>> open- or closed-source software.
>>
>>
>>
>> Please let me know if you have specific questions about Cesium.  I'm happy
>> to provide info and respect that ultimately the decision to use Cesium for
>> Geo4All, MapStory, etc. is up to you.
>>
>>
>>
>> Also, one thought for criteria for Geo4All's endorsement: consider a
>> minimal first requirement of only using projects with OSI approved licenses
>> as this comes with many guarantees about the open use of the project [3].
>>
>>
>>
>> Finally, I suggest avoiding terms like "license free" since if a project
>> does not have a license, it is technically "all rights reserved."  I would
>> also try to avoid "commercial" in some contexts since, at least in the US
>> government's eyes, open-source software is commercial software [15].
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Patrick
>>
>> http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pcozzi/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> [1] http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pcozzi/projects.html
>>
>> [2] https://opensource.org/osd-annotated
>>
>> [3] https://opensource.org/licenses
>>
>> [4] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/
>> blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#code-of-conduct
>>
>> [5] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/
>> blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS.md
>>
>> [6] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cesium-dev/jGgNInY2Fqo
>>
>> [7] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/
>> blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#contributor-license-agreement-cla
>>
>> [8] http://cesiumjs.org/tutorials.html
>>
>> [9] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/
>> blob/master/Documentation/Contributors/README.md
>>
>> [10] http://cesiumjs.org/publications.html#growing-an-
>> open-source-community-lessons
>>
>> [11] http://cesiumjs.org/for-google-earth-developers.html
>>
>> [12] http://cesiumjs.org/demos.html
>>
>> [13] https://www.khronos.org/gltf
>>
>> [14] https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles
>>
>> [15] http://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/#Q:_
>> Is_open_source_software_commercial_software.3F_Is_it_COTS.3F
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GeoForAll mailing list
>> GeoForAll at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geoforall
>>
>>
>
>
>
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