[Qgis-developer] Fwd: [Board] Would you be concerned if the "GeoServices REST API" became an OGC standard?

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Nathan Woodrow <madmanwoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm starting to wonder if anything becoming a OGC is a good thing.
>
> What impact would this have on QGIS?

 For QGIS it would mean you could create a way to read GeoServices
REST API-compliant data from servers. The specification would be open
and so you could check your implementation against the spec to make
sure your code is creating the right requests.

 However, unless an open-source implementation of the server is
available, you won't be able to test it against a real server unless
you pay up, or are beholden to the good nature of someone who has paid
up.

 Imagine testing the WMS code in Qgis only by inspecting the URL it
creates, and not by whether a WMS server returns the image you were
expecting.

 There's a slight parallel with google and KML. Google bought the
company that originally made Google Earth and so got all the code for
KML files. They went to OGC and got KML made a standard, but, unlike
Esri, released libKML as open source. Perhaps if Esri released their
GeoServices REST API server as open source I think we'd be a bit
happier (once we came round from the shock).

[this discussion is also going on a bit on the osgeo-discuss mailing
list, I've tried to focus on the impact on QGIS here rather than on
the FOSS Geo community at large. Plenty of other people making those
points!]

Barry