[Mapserver-users] Open Source economy 101 ;) (was: Fastest Data Format)

[Daniel Morissette]

GAIA wrote:
> 
> I have always been a proponent of MapServer and fended off the ESRI sales force trying to sell me ArcIMS.  We still have a stonger more extensible product in MapServer thanks to all the dev. team.  Let's look at filling this hole.
> 
> Has there been any progress on this issue?  We would be more than happy to help in any way we can.
> 

Just a quick comment, not directly targetted at anyone, more a general
note about the Open Source economy for MapServer users who feel that
some feature is important to them:

If a feature is critical to you and you don't have developers in-house
to implement it yourself, then keep in mind that you can hire one of the
MapServer developers to implement it for you.  The developers have to
pay their bills like everybody else, so features for which funding is
available will always get priority over the ones that nobody wants to
pay for.

In this specific case for instance, this SDE issue seems very important
to many organisations, if it's your case and you know that you saved
10's of thousands of $$ in licenses because you use MapServer then you
might be able to afford a 5-10k$ contract to Steve Lime (the developer
behind SDE support in MapServer) to have him tune it to work the way you
like (if you own SDE then you must have some IT budget ;).  At the end
you still get a better product for a lower price.

Of course even if no funding is available this will eventually be fixed,
but only when one of the developers finds time to do it.  (BTW I think
Jan Hartmann was going to work on this already, not sure what the status
is now.)

Once again, this is not targetted at any of the individuals who wrote in
this thread.  I just wanted to make everyone realize that if you have
access to some $$$ then you can make them work for you (even in the Open
Source world).

Happy New Year to everyone BTW!

Daniel
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 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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