Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

I guess a lot of people will have seen the article on slashdot pointing to an article on a Stanford/Harvard paper on how businesses can win against open source software/technology. I don’t want to get into a debate about how the authors are in fact the spawn of the devil, as you can read the slashdot comments for that. Personally, I started off being slightly disappointed by a number of points that they made, and then quite up-beat about the prognosis for open source as a result.

Why disappointed? Firstly, the article (which is of course a summary of a paper and not the actual paper, so possibly a mis-interpretation) confuses free software with open source, again. Lazy. It assumes that the only reason people will choose an open source product is because it is free, and not because it gives the users better control and freedom from licenses etc. Secondly, they argue that particular types of software are popular because so many people use it (circular argument?, even more lazy?). Apparently this leads to less issues with training, and incompatibility. If this was the case, would Microsoft have had so many issues when they changed the interface for Vista, or Office 2007, and the default file format for Office? Ditto Autocad with their file format in every new release? Consumers are more intelligent than that, and these things do have a big impact on how easy it is to upgrade software.

Why up-beat? Well the point has been made elsewhere that this paper only exists because open source software is seen as a threat. Not only that, all of the strategies outlined in the paper are reactive- how can businesses deal with this threat by using aggressive practices. Even making better, more compatible software is seen as a reaction to this threat, rather than the modus operandi for the company. It’s disappointing that improvement is only seen as a reaction to a threat, but on the other hand if companies are forced to improve their product, and make it more interoperable, everyone wins.

All in all I think it’s disappointing that consumers are given such short shrift in this article, and as always we have this lazy assumption that the open source argument is all about price. It does, however, show that open source software can, and does, have the power to affect the proprietary market, and I find that very encouraging indeed.

I’m off to the AGI conference tomorrow, ready to give my talk about Open Source GIS in the UK on Wednesday. (What kind of nutter agrees to give a talk about open source GIS at a conference supported by ESRI, Autodesk and the Ordnance Survey, amongst others… if I don’t post again you’ll know that I have been “removed” or something).

Anyhow, if anyone wants to meet up, and perhaps huddle in a corner somewhere talking about OSGeo local chapters, or even, I dunno, non-gis things, then catch me there!

The title says it all really, Archaeogeek’s second birthday snuck by the other day without me even noticing. Mr Archaeogeek says this means I have to take him out for dinner. I’m sure he has it the wrong way around, but maybe he needs rewarding for putting up with me! Anyhow, happy birthday to Archaeogeek. I’m even more astounded than I was this time last year that my attention span has lasted this long, given that it has actually been a pretty tough year around these parts. Ah well, here’s to the next year- let’s hope this toddler doesn’t have too much of the “terrible-twos”!

In other news, there was a pretty low-key announcement from the British Cartographic Society about their 2008 Awards for “Excellence in [cartography]“. Props to the Openstreetmap/OpenLayers powered OpenCycleMap, and the Thames Estuary Coastal Habitat Atlas (can’t find a link to this) for triumphing in the Electronic Mapping category. However, tucked away at the bottom of the article was the following telling statement (slightly paraphrased): “(The Ordnance Survey Mastermap Award for Better Mapping was not awarded because there) was minimal or no innovative use of OS MasterMap data”. So… that’s what happens when you make the data too expensive to use… you get no innovative uses of it!

And finally, if you were worried about the affects of the switch-on in Cern earlier this week, well don’t worry. This website will help, and there’s even an rss feed for it. Phew!

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway?

Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in. To be honest, it’s well overdue, but a pain nonetheless…