Mapping Hacks

I’ll just point to HoBu’s summary of the key points of the Open Source Geospatial conference which has left all our heads buzzing, otherwise it’ll take days to write everything down; so many highlights, that the post-impression is just a bright glow.

One big highlight for us was finally getting to meet in real life, our fellow O’Reilly mapping author Tyler Mitchell, whose Web Mapping Illustrated was started 6 months after Mapping Hacks, but will be in the shops at around the same time. Tyler’s article for Directions magazine has caused a little stir today, an introduction to Open Source principles and processes, for the traditional geospatial industry.

The article is as notable for the comments as the contents. We’ve seen this pattern repeat in many domains - the compiler, the unix-derived server, webservers and content management systems, the desktop, desktop applications. As free software grows a sizeable niche in the ecosystem, it comes to be perceived as a “threat” by people embedded in proprietary software culture. The same objections and rationalisations are raised in a climate of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. But by this point, free software in that domain is already being quietly entertained as a viable proposition in business and government.

So this seems like a good sign of a productive crisis, and one of Tyler’s points - that “open source” can sometimes be used as a totem word for a warm, fuzzy set of concepts that includes open access to data and open standards for conveying it - deserves more development. By emphasising Open Standards, developers of Open Source software win. No organisation can come out and state, “no, we’re against open standards, we don’t believe our users should be able to freely export and interchange data, it’s counter to our business model.” In terms of the “vertical stack”, we then reach upwards to free access to tools and downwards to free access to data.

I suppose this has been the Open Geospatial Consortium’s plan for a long time, and we were all happy to hear that they’ve anointed Raj Singh to be their new Prince of Interoperability, and i look forward to spamming him about GeoRDF a great deal.

From an arriviste’s perspective, it seems as if the reluctance of traditional GIS software vendors to open their specifications, their data formats and protocols, has driven innovation in geospatial software, of the open source flavour particularly; Frank Warmerdam’s brilliant work on GDAL, has moved from an exit strategy from locked-in, unreadable data formats, to provide the underpinning for hundreds of transformation utilities and higher level software tools. Would the open source geospatial community have been driven to do so much, had there not been so much to rage against?
Perhaps the best and brightest things are shot through with a thin thread of darkness…

Posted in software |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.