[GRASSLIST:9049] Re: ArcView vs GRASS

[Māris Nartišs]

Hi,

I'm leading GIS practical works for students and we use ArcGIS. Most
of students after those practical works have no clue why they where
pressing all those buttons, they even have no clue what is coordinate
system and why they should define it. Formally they are educated GIS
users, but in reality they are dumb as brick. I have to agree - easy
to use systems may lead to dumb users - You can do all stuff without
understanding why You are doing this.

On 11. 11. 2005. we had so called "GIS Day". I was there with
presentation about Open Source. There was some interest from some huge
(in local terms ;) companies about OS GIS solutions. Most of interest
was about MapServer - looks like this will be OS GIS tool No. 1. in
nearest future. Most of ppl are not ready for open source and are not
ready to think, but I'm doing my best to show that OS GIS can be used
instead of closed source tools.

As I see, GDAL/OGR has Geodatabase support, as ESRI has published its
shema, only problem - it can be accessed via ODBC. There is a mdb read
library on SF.net. We need someone to put all this stuff in one peace.


With thanks to all OS developers and supporters,
Maris Nariss.


2005/11/13, Francisco Alonso <alonsarp at um.es>:
>
>  Hi all,
>
> I have been teaching GIS using GRASS for years and definitively good students
> adquire a better knowledge about what GIS is than using ArcView. However the
> ironic result is that when they have a job, and they have it easely, they
> have to work with ArcView "because it is what their employers bought". At the
> end they do the stuff in GRASS and show it with Arc.View!
>
> Best regards
>
> Paco
>
> --
> Francisco Alonso Sarría
> Departamento de Geografía (Area de Geografía Física)
> Universidad de Murcia. Campus La Merced
> E-30001 Murcia
> Telfn: +34 968364357
> www.um.es/geograf/sigmur
>
>