Q&A to choose a software stack

[Jody Garnett]

Jason Birch wrote:
> Sorry for the top-post (and probably html) webmail sucks.
>  
> You meant "visibility", not "viability", right? ;)  I think that Frank's disambiguation rings true.
>  
> Another government user:
>  
> Nosaj (clever attempt at anonymity) - works for a municipal government, and is highly constrained by both staff time and budget.  Nosaj has looked at open source geospatial before, but was put off by the implementation effort and the amount of time it would take to figure out how the various pieces fit together, especially in his primarily-Microsoft environment.  At that time, proprietary software had a better c/b ratio because of the ease of implementation, consolidated documentation, and low ongoing maintenance effort.  
>  
> Has come back to see if OSGeo has anything that allows someone who is not an OSGeo guru to quickly install and forget.  Nosaj wants to be able to get on with providing high quality line-of-business solutions that are themselves easy to maintain.  He is interested, but doesn't have much time to look.  He wants big captions, a snazzy "show me" live demo, and a couple recommended stacks with quick Windows/IIS installations.
>  
An interesting idea there ... and a bit of an evil idea. Breakdown our 
software into working stacks and the play a Q & A game allowing Nosaj to 
find a couple of  stack to try out with a single quickstart/install 
instructions.  I have a series of notes of how to install 
Postgres/PostGIS/Mapserver/GeoServer/uDig on to a laptop that Nosaj 
could check out to see if it was suitable....

But the point is well made, by focusing on the projects we lose the 
solution that Nosaj (and indeed several of the other people on the list 
came here to find).
Politically we may need need to find "more then one" stack with 
pros/cons between them in that feature table the that
Jody