Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I am proud to finally announce the inaugural meetup of the nascent UK local chapter of OSGEO on Thursday 1st May, from 4.30 to 7pm (or later if we can find a suitable hostelry) at the Radisson SAS Hotel, Stansted Airport, just outside London. For those that don’t know- OSGEO is a global organisation founded to encourage and support development in open source GIS.
We have been trying to get together some interest in a UK local chapter for some time now, so I am really pleased to announce this event. The agenda is still open to negotiation, so if you would like to come along and talk about something, or demo something, then you’re more than welcome. The only fixed point is that we would like to come up with a roadmap for moving the UK chapter forward, and hopefully provide a forum in which like-minded people (eg you) can discuss FOSS GIS and the issues around it. Furthermore, Tyler Mitchell will be giving a short talk on OSGEO globally, and will also be available for personal discussions with people or companies interested in OSGEO.
There is a wiki page about the event here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_UK_Meetup_May_2008, please sign up if you’re interested so we can get some idea of numbers, and please feel free to pass on this information to anyone else you know who might be interested. There are links on that page to maps and hotel options if you need them.
I very much look forward to hopefully meeting some or all of you in May!

Be there or be badly encoded kml… (or something)

It would appear that ESRI (UK) were as surprised as we were when they received notification of ESRI (US)’s decision to tighten up the license agreements, and they are negotiating on behalf of all of us educational charities/associate sites to get us a little more leeway. It has to be said that the email we received from them, which I based my blog post on, contained nothing about this whatsoever, and basically told us we had till the end of March to pack our metaphorical bags, but we are grateful to them for their efforts.

However, the point still stands. By using closed source software, we are all subject to the whims of software vendors, who can change the license agreement to stop people using their products whenever they feel like it.  So it has never happened to you? I’d have said the same thing before 4pm yesterday…

UPDATE: We’ve had some more feedback about this from ESRI UK- see my other post for details (though don’t get too excited because nothing *really* changes)

So, our move to open source gets a boost today, from an unexpected quarter. In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an educational charity we are no longer allowed to have an educational discount for using their software and, not only that, our license codes will cease to work at the end of this month. So, we have 3 weeks, with the Easter holidays in the middle, to extricate ourselves and our ongoing projects from ArcGIS and into something else or find the many thousands of pounds to buy the full licenses for all of our staff.

I should explain something about the nature of “commercial” archaeological units in the UK, to those that don’t know much about them. We are usually not affiliated with universities, so we are not educational establishments as such, although we are an educational charity. We exist to fulfil a legal remit to study the archaeology of an area before it is developed. We also undertake educational projects on behalf of English Heritage, the government’s body in charge of cultural heritage. The whole reason we exist is to further the archaeological and historical understanding about the country we live in.

Previously, my biggest gripe has been that we can’t get academic discounts for data, unlike our colleagues in universities or local government. Despite the fact that our job is a legal requirement, we have to pay through the nose for the mapping that we need to do it. Getting hold of geological data, or anything that might allow us to look deeper into the area we’re studying is often out of the question. But at least we had the software to work with.

I can’t figure out what ESRI hope to achieve by this. It clearly affects many other educational charities apart from ourselves, across many different industries. Do they think that we all have secret pots of cash hidden under our desks and that we’re just going to throw up our hands and go “fair cop guv, we’ll pay the full cost now, here’s 7,000 pounds per user”? Do they seriously think that 3 weeks is enough time to get the money or rebuild all of our work in other packages?

Well ESRI, in case it’s not clear, we’re not going to buy your full versions. It’s unlikely that we will ever use your software again, and you’ve made it much easier for us to openly campaign for open source solutions throughout our own industry and other related sectors, and anywhere else where people are concerned about getting screwed over by software vendors.

So, we have to part company. It was nice knowing you for a while, but you’ve changed and I just don’t think we’re compatible any more. Now, where’s QGIS…

Well, there was I just working away in the office, on my super-cool portable GIS setup, doing some work on a postgresql-driven database all working nicely on the USB stick. I should say that this has been working just fine in both my home (Vista) and office (XP) environment for months now.

Time came to head off home, so I stopped everything, ejected the stick nicely, took it home and went to start working on it again… only for postgresql to refuse to work. “Access Denied”, it said. “What do you mean, Access Denied?” I said. “Access Denied”, it said. So I tried it on my hubby’s Win XP machine. “No Problem”, it said. Repeat until you’re sick of trying.

So I remembered the Vista Windows Update on Monday, and restored my laptop back to before that. No joy…

Now, I have tried to be objective about Vista. I like my laptop, and to my mind the extra security measures were (until I turned them off) about as obtrusive as those on Ubuntu. I didn’t think it ran all that slowly, and had never found a programme or device that wasn’t compatible. Maybe I was just lucky.

Then, at Christmas, the rot started to set in. WinGrass doesn’t (or didn’t) work all that well. Cygwin wouldn’t play well. I ended up having to set up a virtual machine and run Ubuntu in it just to get to a stage where I could learn how to use GRASS. And now this. I’ll go to the mailing lists, of course, and try and figure out why it no longer wants to play, but please, just give me an operating system that lets me look under the hood and doesn’t unilaterally decide when to stop doing something it has quite happily done for months.

I’ll have to stick with Windows for the moment, because I need to get the portable GIS system working, and I have a sweet ITunes setup (and an even sweeter Ipod Touch), but I’m off to buy a copy of XP before it’s no longer possible to do that…