[mapserver-users] Re: WFS intersect request

[Daniel Morissette]

On 11-06-16 08:47 AM, Yewondwossen Assefa wrote:
>
> On 16/06/2011 7:29 AM, Marco Bagni wrote:
>>
>> You and I (and many more users with the same problem) are facing the
>> "other side" of the Open Source. Who writes the code and releases it for
>> public domain, sometimes arranges things in such a way that, elegantly,
>> the users are "suggested" to turn to his commercial consultancy services
>> in order to have the information that makes the whole thing work; he has
>> to put some bread on his table too!
>>
> wow, that is an unfair comment. I think you are very wrong on your
> assumptions and how you think people make a living on open source. Non
> constructive comment here.
>


"Unfair" is the only word I can think of as well. The rest of your 
message was a call for participation which was great (and I'm with you 
on that part: the community needs to stay involved), but this paragraph 
was unnecessary and ruined the value of the rest of the message.

The MapServer dev community (over 20 committers BTW) is one of the most 
open and fair ones that I've seen, as demonstrated by the very large and 
active users community that has been around the project for 15 years, so 
please do not undermine their efforts with comments like this.

There may be other open source projects where users are intentionally 
being held hostage by the authors using hidden features and lack of 
documentation, but MapServer is not one of those and I can assure you 
that the lack of documentation that you encountered for some WFS 
features is not one of these instances. The problem with lack of docs in 
many areas is most of the time due to things evolving and lack of 
time/resources to update documentation.

I'm glad to read that YOU WILL contribute back, since user contributed 
howtos are part of the solution. The wiki is at 
http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ and waiting for contributions.

-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000