[postgis-users] ESRI San Diego

[Paul Ramsey]

Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:

> Don't forget that for everything else they might be to closed source, 
> ESRI is one of the founding members of the OGC.

And they have been ignoring any standard which might cause product 
interoperability for the past several years. :/ I have no illusions 
about ESRI's interest in interoperability or the OGC standards process. 
They are an OGC member so they do not get blindsided by pre-release 
standards, and so they can manipulate the process in ways which are 
convenient to their own product strategies. Just because they are in OGC 
does not mean than (a) they are not monopolists or (b) they are not 
dedicated to remaining monopolists. MicroSoft is a member of lots of 
standards bodies too.

> Are you going to ask them when there's gonna be ArcView for Linux?

I'll ask, if I can. They have a nice Q&A session at the end of the 
conference, but it might be on the Friday, and I leave on the evening of 
the Thursday. :(  Jack had the gall to talk about ESRI's "commitment to 
open source" in his plenary last year -- turns out it just means they 
distribute (mostly other peoples) Avenue, AML and VB scripts. Whee, some 
commitment. One would think that ArcView 3.X would be a trivial Linux 
port, since it already has HP/UX and Solaris ports. Depends on the 
underlying cross platform GUI library they used though, which ESRI did 
not write themselves but licenced from another company.

-- 
       __
      /
      | Paul Ramsey
      | Refractions Research
      | Email: pramsey at refractions.net
      | Phone: (250) 885-0632
      \_