[postgis-users] Re: Conformance testing

[Martin Daly]

> 	I have to agree. It's probably not worth mentioning on the intro
> page. I was just curious. 
> 	It's interesting that the OGC would want to discourage 
> open source
> and perhaps indicates where their loyalty lies. PostGIS would 
> appear to be
> an ideal fit for implementation of WMS and WFS sites, which has to be
> disturbing to some commercial interests but great news for application
> developers.

Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  You obviously do not know that the reference
implementations of WMS (deegree), WFS (GeoServer), WCS and CS-W (both
deegree again I think) are all Open Source.  These were paid for out of
OGC testbed sponsorship monies.

Where Open Source may fall between the cracks in the OGC compliance
framework is that the compliance certification (actually a Trademark
Licence Agreement contract) requires an "owner" of the product, and a
payment.  The TLA is protecting the OGC "brand", so OGC sees the need to
have a contract to do so.  Otherwise, how would OGC (for want of a
better word) "punish" contraventions, e.g. claiming compliance where
none has been gained?

OGC is also not a charity.  The TLA fees go towards supporting the
compliance tests, which can be a considerable amount of work to develop
and maintain.  For an OGC Associate Member (like Refractions), with
gross annual revenue of up to US $50 million (wild guess: this covers
Refractions), the TLA fee for a single product is less than US $1000.
The fees are staged so that, for revenues of less than US $1 million,
the fee is US $80.  These hardly seem prohibitively expensive.  You can
check all of the fees here:
http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=testing&view=testfees

I am well aware that OGC is far from perfect, but please check your
facts before making similarly bold assertions.

Regards,
Martin