[GRASS5] National Center for Open Source Policy and Research

[cgnicholas at alamedanet.net]

There is some karma responding to this statement, on this particular
list... :-]

I recall when I supported GIS software vendors for Sun Microsystems in
the early 90's, and at one point knew root passwords for machines
containing source code for ESRI, Autodesk, Oracle, Sybase, Informix,
and Bentley.  I also participated in the winning Sun-Hughes bid for
EOSDIS.

Jack Dandgermmond was making the rounds in DC, railing against GRASS
because "my tax dollars are funding my competition", and with the
Forest Service (601?) contract, ESRI surpassed Intergraph in GIS market
share. The GRASS user's group, a hardscrabble collection of
individuals, to whom I used to sneak compilers and helped get a machine
or two, had the foresight to change their charter from GRASS advocacy
to interoperability. NSDI, Gore's 'Digital Earth' speech, and the rest
of OpenGIS history are part of the lore. 

Whether or not OpenGIS, and national GIS policy in general, diffuse
into irrelevance by virtue of trying to standardize all of enterprise
IT (anyone remember GILS? etc) remains to be seen, but it is difficult
to say that the OpenGIS WMS and WFS protocols are not fully embraced by
the federal government, and international institutions in general.

Being here near the center of the current portal *Earth wars, I think
the real challenge for the government is to find relevance when folks
like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are subsidizing their GIS offerings to
the tune of tens of millions of dollars, just so people will be
addicted to them. 

As for analytical capability, I think the real challenge will be a
Darwinian struggle as to what is the most sustainable platform for
service delivery. If you can make a case for running your shop better
with GRASS, can find suitable talent, and get it supported, and can
genreally do mission critical stuff, why not.

But ESRI is ESRI and Intergraph is Intergraph, software, professional
services, retired generals and all. But what can be accomplished on
open source is not to be discounted. In time of strapped cash at all
levels of government, the cost of Oracle+SDE+ArcIMS+per-seat licenses
versus PostGIS+MMS is not trivial. For example, GlobeXplorer is
*completely* built with open source and custom glue, running databases
on >20 CPUs. Users don't care, so long as it is reliable and has the
content they need.

I'll just note that there is fairly high-level support for the general
concept of creating a "guest" co-location facility directly at EROS
datacenter, whereby people could run whatever (GRASS, ERDAS, etc)
directly against huge datasets on a managed subnet, and indeed realize
the first "A" in DAAC. (distributed ACTIVE archive center).

And at this point I'll also make a plug for my hobby project:
http://iserver1.ciat.cgiar.org/mms/CGIAR_prop.html .

Chris

> There is no U.S. Federal policy on GIS. At best, GIS policy exists on
an 
> agency-by-agency basis (sometimes at the Dept. level, e.g. maybe at 
> Interior). I can say unequivocally thet there is no Dept. of Commerce
or 
> NOAA or NWS policy on GIS.
> 
> Regards,
> Tom