"It [open source software] is a positive disruption of the status quo."
- Peter Rieks, manager for Autodesk's geospatial products at FOSS4G in Capetown this week, as quoted in IOL Technology
Related tags: Open [+], 1st [+]
The two organizations agree to expand collaboration and promote the synergy between open standards and open source software in the geospatial domain. The OGC, founded in 1994, is the world's leading industry organization for geoprocessing standards used by the world's providers of geoprocessing software. The OSGeo's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led open source geospatial software projects, most of which depend on open standards like those from the OGC.
The OGC doesnt care if software are proprietary or open source. Our goal is that OGC standards help make geospatial or location-based content and services ubiquitousto improve the ability of decision makers to address the many pressing social, environmental and economic issues they face.
Whats important, from the OGCs point of view, isnt the purchasing and licensing details of software products, but their adherence to a shared, open, non-proprietary system for communicating geographically.
What is the relationship between OSGeo and OGC?
There is no relationship between OSGeo and OGC. OGC is a organization for creating GIS standards, while OSGeo is an organization for promoting open source GIS work. That said, a number of parties/individuals in OSGeo work with OGC standards, and vice versa. It is also an explicit goal of OSGeo to support and promote standards, including OGC standards.
That distinction is important, says Andy Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove LLP in Boston who studies licensing issues. Under contract law, the remedy is monetary damages, which aren't likely to amount to anything involving open-source software that is given away, Updegrove says.
However, statutory damages - money awarded for a violation of law - can be awarded for copyright infringement without requiring proof of monetary damages, Updegrove says. Also, people can recover attorney fees for copyright infringement cases, he says.
"And, most importantly for licences such as the GPL, it means that your rights to use the copyrighted work at all disappear," Updegrove says, referring to the General Public License, widely used for open source software.
...it's only natural that the cost-conscious, nonprofit $24 million company would turn to open source software to run the heart of its operations, from capturing and storing archaeological data to running routine business functions -- even its telephone system.
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Chief Information Officer Chris Puttick. "And open source is the best long-term cost-saver and gives us the ultimate flexibility to adapt without restriction."
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[The CIO begain] starting with the servers, most of which now run on Ubuntu (some 6.06 Long Term Support [LTS] and others on 8.04 LTS), and the free version of VMware, then trying the OpenOffice desktop application and the PostgreSQL open source database, which has an add-on for a geographic information system (GIS).
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Additional changes are still under way, including migration to open source GIS packages, including gvSIG, QGIS and/or GRASS,...
I would like to announce a free ($0) geospatial event on June 2nd and 3rd in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. This event hosted at the campus of Carleton University. It is an outreach event to showcase the best of open source geospatial software and give attendees the opportunity to listen to industry speakers.
The event is being organized by OSGeo, Ingres, and Carleton University. It is known as Geocamp2008 (also known as osbootcamp6). More information can be found at the osbootcamp web site under osbootcamp6. It can also be found under OSGeo's events calendar for June. This event takes place the day before the Geotec conference in Ottawa.
[It] allows Urgent Couriers' dispatchers to pinpoint the location of every courier on a map, zoom in on couriers and view all relevant job information. The allocation of jobs to each of the company's 85 contractors is also assisted by GPS ensuring that couriers closest to jobs are efficiently assigned to pick-ups, preventing the need for them to double back to jobs, and saving on time and fuel.
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The new GPS system for Urgent Couriers is based on open source database PostgreSQL (with PostGIS) and an open source mapserver, UMN Mapserver. GBS built the interface and web functionality in Internet Explorer (7) and configured it to fit Urgent Couriers' dispatch system.
We use an open-source library called Mapnik to render the maps, so that library does the heavy lifting for us. Paul is also working on a how-to article, in the spirit of giving back to the open-source community, that explains how to use Mapnik.