The Right Tool for the Job

Use the right tool for the job. This is one of the guiding principles of good craftsmanship, and it would be a fine slogan for an Open Source and Proprietary Geospatial Foundation.

GIS, as practiced, is more craft than science, and requires both a diverse tool kit and a pragmatic sensibility. Almost every open source-using practitioner, myself included, applies a combination of open source and proprietary tools to their problems. However, the pragmatism that gets us through our daily tasks is not an appropriate ideal for the entity that calls itself the geospatial open source leader. OSGeo should be single-mindedly promoting an end-to-end open source GIS software stack. Interoperability with proprietary software is a means to this end, but is not, by itself, a great enough goal for OSGeo.

Comments

Re: The Right Tool for the Job

Author: Paul Ramsey

So what should the motto of the "real" OSGeo be then? "Use the wrong tool for the job! You may not get the work done, but you'll sleep better at night."

Re: The Right Tool for the Job

Author: tomesh

i would love to use open gis. really. but, havent you noticed that, its interface is totally unfriendly. i installed grass and tried to do few things with that. terrible experience. when i had an occasion to use commercial product in my towns planning dept, i did all the tasks with ease. it seems to me that grass is for finding problem which can be solved with it, and commercial stuff is just built to solve all real gis problems. i might be wrong but thats what i can tell from my experience. wish you good luck working on your soft, im watching you and waiting when it is user friendly at last.