Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Thanks to the Linfiniti Geo Blog, we get what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious article ever, about Oracle Xe.

It’s an open source blogger’s dream post (all quotations are direct from the article). We get fear-mongering about open source “maintenance, support, and security headaches”. We get limitations built in, ostensibly to make it “easy to install”. We get accidental admissions that “if you can reduce your EE license costs by even a single CPU, you’ve made your effort worthwhile”, and the crazy notion that we should “reduce the load on enterprise hardware” by installing databases on desktops instead. We do, however, get “A New Type of Support: The Community”, but beware, because “you won’t be able to create a Technical Assistance Request (TAR) for XE issues regardless of the support contract you have”.

It’s worth checking out some other posts by the same author, in particular this comparison between Oracle 10, PostgreSQL and MySQL, where he admitted that he was “strongly biased towards Oracle and fully expected no real competition”, and then found that PostgreSQL came out tops in his tests. Oh well, props to him for publishing it, I guess!

OK, OK, these articles were written in 2006 and 2005 respectively, and while pointing out the unintentional absurdity of this mindset is fun, it’s not big and it’s not clever. There are serious points to take away here. This article unintentionally highlights all the reasons why you should avoid the proprietary software model, like the need to put limitations in the products you want to give away for free so you can justify selling the fully featured versions at a much higher price. At the same time that it implies all sorts of bad things will happen with open source, it talks about a community for support (though not for real technical support, because that’s one of the limitations of their free product).  We (in the open source community) can see that this model is broken, and that we have better products, better support, better community. As has been said elsewhere, what happens when everyone else wises up to this?

Recently I watched a video by Seth Godin that talked about how things are broken, which, as well as being really funny, made me realise that so many things are indeed broken. Take the firefox extension update process for example. I appreciate it letting me know extensions are available automatically, but when it finishes it leaves you on a window with a single button saying “continue”. Why? If that’s the only option, then why not simply “continue” without my input? If you’re expecting me to make a choice at that point then I need more buttons…

Anyhow, in case anyone was in any doubt that licensing of proprietary software is broken, then this is a great example of the sheer absurdity of it all. For those who don’t want to click on the link- once you license the software in one country, you can only use it in that language, whether you want to or not. Yep, definitely broken.

Crikey,  that’s the first time I’ve left it nearly a month between posts! At the moment it feels a little like one of those games you play when you’re a kid, and someone shouts “red” so you go and hit the red post, then they shout “blue” and you dash to blue, then they shout “red” again, then “green” really quick before you’ can catch your breath, and before you know it you’re stuck in the middle unable to move. So what, this happens to everyone, I know, I’m not looking for sympathy.

Many exciting things have been happening though! I’ve kept quiet here about our technical consultancy, OA Digital (though if you’ve seen me speak over the last year you’ll have heard about it), but we’ve been helping to provide open source advocacy services to the Welsh Assembly Government, at the invitation of Environment Systems and One Bright Space, and we’re working on some interesting web-mapping projects involving Roman Kilns, based on PostgreSQL, FeatureServer and OpenLayers, and Planning Applications, using MapGuide Open Source.

That doesn’t leave much time for anything else, but I am also at the final stages of readying Portable GIS version 2 for general release. It has been ready for a while, but I sent it out to some testers, then what do you know, PostgreSQL 8.4 and PostGIS 1.4 came out, so I’ve got some updating to do. The new version has a much swankier interface and a proper installer (with a 500MB exe to download rather than a 1GB zip file- that’s progress).

Finally, for “fun” and in my “spare time”, I’m also working through the GeoBI offerings and Geoserver/PostGIS versioning. There are some good posts brewing on those just as soon as I can find the extra hours in the day…