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Friday 10 October 2008

FOSS4G Round up? Welcome back to the Internet

News from FOSS4G has been very light this year; one of the only round-ups I have found is from Directions Magazine.
 
The article highlights Digifesto blog post - "FOSS4G2008 - Culture shock" which is shocking to me for a number of reasons. The main one stems from a representation of the OSGeo mission statement that I find troublesome.

Here is the actual mission statement:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data.
I would like to thank Sebastian for providing some of the only coverage to date on FOSS4G - the real standout blog post is this one - "Get Real". I spent some time in Africa and this post covers some the central problem of applying solutions, that are often Internet based, into an in appropriate context.

I join everyone in offering Paul Ramsey congradulations on getting this years Sol Katz Award.

Jesse Eichar was kind enough to send a Summary of Foss4G to the udig-devel mailing list. Word on the IRC channels is that FOSS4G was a success, everyone is still tired, and that blog posts will need to wait until a decent internet connection is found.

Welcome back to the internet OSGeo members - I missed you!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your commentary and gentle criticism.

I'm sorry if I misrepresented OSGeo. I didn't mean to imply that "pissing of ESRI" was anything like its central goal. Obviously, OSGeo stands for much more than that.

In that commentI was referring to a comment Arnulf had made flippantly in a restaurant earlier in the week. In retrospect, it was obviously wrong to project that sentiment onto the entire organization.