2007 (old posts, page 6)

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Backronyms for KML

I'm one of those who feels that KML needs an update if it's going to become a standard. Keyhole Markup Language has a legacy sound to it. Here are a few possibilities:

Kartography Markup Language. Think Krab. A nod to the old-timers who bemoan what passes for cartography these days, dagnabbit.

Kang and Kodos's Markup Language. I bet I'm not the only one who sometimes feels like an alien presence monitoring an oblivious Earth, ripe for the plucking.

A quick pass through my OED didn't turn up any real winners. Let me know if you have any ideas. Best one wins a free copy of OWSLib.

Update: the winner, from the GeoRSS list, is KML Markup Language.

Comments

Re: Backronyms for KML

Author: James Fee

I'd go with Krusty Markup Language The clown would be happy to lend his name.....

Re: Backronyms for KML

Author: Matthew Giger

KML does not have much to do with Cartography. How about: Krufty Markup Language Kool kidz Markup Language Killer Markup Language man... Kornhole Markup Language Since Google is just so darn important, why don't they just appropriate an existing acronym: Google Markup Language (.gml) or better yet: Universal Markup Language (.uml) Or just: Markup Language (.ml) Markup (.m) How about just .

Re: Backronyms for KML

Author: Sean

I'll buy anything with the Krusty seal of approval.

Deliberately Obtuse

I'm sorry, but this post is nonsense. There's almost nothing more annoying than deliberate obtuseness about open source and free software.

Comments

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Paul Ramsey

Deliberately obtuse, or just another clear demonstration that using the word "free" causes most people to draw the wrong conclusions about the most important aspect of the software. If the meaning is only clear to a small in-group, then it is not a useful word for wide communication, it's jargon, and we should stick to arguing the finer points over beers, and use some other word for general communication.

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Allan

I dare say that Jeff knows enough about the software industry to understand what is meant by "Free" when it's part of the "FOSS" acronym. And, no, there's nothing more or less pure about "freeness". It's pretty nearly binary. It's either Free or it's not. The free-o-meter is here.

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Sean

Indeed, Allan. Paul, I think Oracle (at the root of the discussion linked by Jeff Thurston) is also fully aware of the meaning of free in this context.

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Paul Ramsey

Some software that is free is not actually Free. And some software that is Free is not free. And some software is both free and Free at the same time. And finally lots of software is neither free nor Free. Yeah, that's crystal clear, there's no way the Oracle submitters made an honest mistake... *cough*

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Allan

If the Oracle submitters made a mistake, then is the best way to teach them to (a) let them in but don't say anything or (b) respond to them that they may have misunderstood and perhaps after doing some additional reading they may want to show how their workshop addresses the issue? Perhaps the FOSS4G2007 web site could include a bit more guidance on this... *cough*

Re: Deliberately Obtuse

Author: Paul Ramsey

I see, the problem is not that we are using obscure language, it is that we are not *explaining* our obscure language well enough. Anyways, obviously we will be explaining the issue to the Oracle submitters, but I feel bad about having baited them into the mistake in the first place with misleading language.

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.

Get Confident, Stupid!

I've been trying to ignore this nagging pain, but it just won't go away. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation will not assert technical superiority of open source software, and worse, makes statements like this in its FAQ:

The foundation respects the important role that proprietary software plays in our industry, and is not trying to get rid of it, or the companies that produce it.

Better to be like the ASF and simply make no statement at all about proprietary software. The one above is an embarrassment.

However, the foundation takes the position that free and open source software can and should play an important role in the geospatial industry. Furthermore, having quality open source alternatives to proprietary software can be good for the end user, the industry, and even the proprietary software vendors. In fact, most proprietary geospatial software is built on open source software to some extent.

Having alternatives can be good? Of course, but the thing that motivates me -- and I'm not alone, here -- are superior alternatives. The open source and free software movements are winning. We're producing the best web server, the best web browser, the best operating system. GDAL, PostGIS, and MapServer (to name a few) are displacing proprietary software in shops on their technical merits. Come on, OSGeo milquetoasts, stand up for open source. If you need help, I'll loan you my Troy McClure self-help video collection.

Comments

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Allan

I think you're right. OSGeo needs to be confident. The recent email thread about a potential workshop at FOSS4G by Oracle is a case in point. There seemed to be a considerable breadth of opinion in the response.

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Matt Perry

The blanket statement that all open-source is superior to proprietary is a bit far fetched. I think OSGEO's statement strikes a perfect tone. Open source and proprietary feed off of each other and the competition is healthy for all. The key is to highlight areas where open source is ahead of the pack. My totally off-the-cuff analysis of the current playing field: In some realms open source GIS is technically superior (web mapping), in some it is at least as capable but more difficult to learn and deploy (geostatistics, analysis) and in others proprietary software is leading the way (Desktop). For myself, its just about picking the right tool for the job. If a piece of software lets me get my job done better and faster, then I use it. And if the goal is to increase adoption of open source, playing the superiority card won't get you very far with the pointy-haired boss types :-)

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Sean

Matt, you just pulled that blanket statement out of thin air.

Be Confident

Author: Matt Giger

Open source is great, and indeed superior in many areas. However commercial software is important and often have the best products out there since they can devote millions or billions of dollars into the making of a platform. I don't know where OSGeo is coming from, but I do think their statement is reasonable. Open Software provides a baseline of functionality that the commercial world must meet or beat in order to survive (theoretically).

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Andy

I like Matt's analysis. He's being nice about geostatistics, analysis though. Web mapping hands down Open Source wins the day with MapServer. Nothing comes even remotely close to Mapserver. Desktop hands down ArcGIS wins by a land slide even over other proprietary solutions. ArcGIS may suck but it sucks less than anything else by a long ways. As far as superior OSs go from an end user stand point Open Source has a long ways to go before it even comes close to Windows. Just in Fonts alone Windows totally spanks the competition from and end user stand point. Every time I fire up an Open Source OS I just sigh and realize how far Open Source OSs still have to go before non-super users are ever going to take a look at them. It's getting there but even Novell's stuff isn't close yet, and I love my Suse but I am also realistic. I deal with end users when I deploy software I have written and 99% of them aren't even remotely ready for a non-Windows or non-Mac solution. PostGIS is a better database than Oracle Spatial. PostgreSQL is just plain the best database out there period in my opinion but it has no good management UI and the largest enterprise GIS system (SDE) doesn't work with it. That is fixing to change hopefully very soon and once you can use PostGIS from ArcCatalog I think we will see a big shift away from Oracle. All that said I agree they shouldn't open their mouths about proprietary software.We should be concentrating on writing better software and promoting it on it's merits and sticking up for solutions we believe in. Let their spin doctors do whatever they want but our spin doctors should at least be sticking up for the software we write so long as it is the technically superior alternative. If we aren't the technically superior alternative then we need to shut up and code better software until we are.

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Matt Perry

Sean, Yeah I see your point. You didn't say ALL open source software was superior but you did claim: "The Open Source Geospatial Foundation will not assert technical superiority of open source software" and "The open source and free software movements are winning." .. both of which indicate you feel that open source software is superior to proprietary across the board. Sorry if I put words in your mouth.

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Frank Warmerdam

Thanks for your analysis of my modest FAQ write-ups. They are an attempt to avoid unnecessary controversy and to be a statement that is broadly acceptable to those involved in OSGeo. I don't see any compelling reason to change them. Of course, I'm also a big fan of "good enough" instead of always aiming for technical superiority. No doubt a character flaw.

Re: Get Confident, Stupid!

Author: Sean

Frank, thanks for the comment. I'm not calling on you to give any of your friends and customers in the proprietary software business the finger. Just eliminate the proprietary bias in the FAQ, and show some pride and confidence in open source. Like GeoServer does.

OpenLayers 2.3

OpenLayers 2.3 is out (since 21 February, in fact). For details, see the release notes. Christopher Schmidt told me that MetaCarta is bringing a community developer in for a vector sprint (previously). I'm eager to see the results. Pleiades has a milestone this spring which will produce a release of PleiadesOpenLayers compatible with OpenLayers 2.3 or 2.4. Currently, POL distributes a patched OL 2.1.

Update: more from Christopher Schmidt.

Suggestion for MapServer 5.0

The MapServer 5.0 plan has some compelling items (feature-level transparency, AGG rendering in particular), but the one thing I'd really like to see is separation of MapServer's cartographic and web application aspects. These are entangled both in the code and in configuration, so it's no small task, but one that would reward the community.

Frankly, making effective maps and administering a web server are skills that rarely go together. Separating cartography from the web application allows changes to be made to the cartographic presentation with greatly reduced risk of breaking the application that serves up the map. The separation would also make it easier to test and deploy maps, even across platforms.

Similarly, separating these concerns would make development of MapServer a bit more sane. Cartographic enhancements would be much less likely to break the web application, and the upcoming changes to accommodate WFS 1.1 and WMS 1.3 (for example) would be much less likely to break the cartographic engine.

Last, but not least: I consider the built-in MapServer web application (mapserv, or mapserv.exe) to be cumbersome, and a bad investment today. The W*S protocols are better implemented in your favorite web programming language. PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET -- all surpass C for working with HTTP requests, strings, and XML. All have better templating. All have better memory management (except perhaps PHP). Back when I was playing ultimate frisbee, we used to heckle our teammates, yelling "Drop the piano!" at the tired guy who couldn't run down the disc. MapServer's built-in, written in C, web application is that piano.

Comments

Re: Suggestion for MapServer 5.0

Author: Matthew Giger

I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. Having another application to serve up http data outside of apache in this day and age is just silly. Agg is very nice at rendering antialiased lines (MS uses it in VE), I would love to see some sort of a Python MapServer library (with the crucial performance parts in C) with a Mapnik (mapnik.org which also uses Agg) renderer and OpenLayers. That would be a nice solution...

Re: Suggestion for MapServer 5.0

Author: hobu

Patches graciously accepted :)

Re: Suggestion for MapServer 5.0

Author: Sean

I'm still a committer, Howard. Consider this post a paradigm patch for the brain ;)

Re: Suggestion for MapServer 5.0

Author: Andy

I have to disagree on the mapserv thing. I wrote an app for small devices for AT&T at one time that used mapserv and it worked like gang busters. When you have a device side application and you just need images streamed to it and the app itself handles everything else mapserv is the absolute bomb. The Oregon & Washington market AT&T technicians still use this app on their Blackberries and Motorola radio phones. Without mapserv I would have been up a creek. For regular web maps I always used the PHP libraries but for small devices nothing worked better than mapserv.

CUGOS

The Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source. I'm not sure if they are hewing to the official Cascadia boundaries or not.

Comments

Re: CUGOS

Author: Aaron Racicot

Well, we are actually modeling the organization after the "The Republic Of Cascadia Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs" [1] ... an exercise for the reader is to replace all occurrences of Sasquatch with GIS... it actually works! Obviously great influence from you guys at FRUGOS. Let's just hope we can get the same type of regional support. We are starting small (greater Seattle area) but hope to have a broad influence within "Cascadia". Aaron [1] - http://zapatopi.net/bsa/

Re: CUGOS

Author: Sean

Aaron, the more UGOS the better. Let me know if any of you want to join our top secret Metric Time OGC Filter Working Group.

Pseudo-Open Source Companies

The provocative post by Nat Torkington about pseudo-open source companies at OSCON makes me wonder how many of these will be showing up at FOSS4G 2007, and if anybody will even object as Nat does.

Comments

Re: Pseudo-Open Source Companies

Author: James Fee

These things are all marketing anyway. I'm not surprised to see companies "push the envelope" just to get in front of people. I had a product pitched to me last month which claimed to be "open source compatible". What this meant on further inspection was that the website ran on both Linux and Firefox (though the code was clearly .NET with SQL Server only backend).

Re: Pseudo-Open Source Companies

Author: Andy

I went to OSCON last year. I won't go back unless my employer forces me to go. I used to work for AT&T which is a company that is huge on using Open Source so I used to have to go. I quit AT&T and work for a smaller software company now so I doubt I'll be forced to endure OSCON again any time soon. The years I went the seminars etc. looked like: Perl, Perl, Perl, Perl, Perl, Perl, an intro to something not Perl, Perl, Perl, Perl, why we should all love Perl, a few talks about new Perl things in addition to everything else being about Perl, and a hilarious speech by Damian Conway. The only thing worth going for was Damian Conway. As far as the pseudo Open Source companies go I say if their product isn't Open Source they shouldn't be there in a speaking or advertising capacity.

Re: Pseudo-Open Source Companies

Author: Sean

Funny, Andy. Perl was my favorite tool back in those days, but I haven't written a line of it yet in 2007.

Re: Pseudo-Open Source Companies

Author: Nat

Hi, Andy. Sorry to hear you had such a miserable time at OSCON. I sure hope there's more balance in the program these days--we have people like Guido, Laura Thompsom, Edd Dumbill, Chad Fowler, Simon Willison, Avi Bryant, and others on the program committee to get just that balance. As for FOSS4G, the corporate involvement in open source geo is still in its early days but it'll only grow. Stay vigilant and keep the bastards honest.

Re: Pseudo-Open Source Companies

Author: Paul Ramsey

On OSCON being Perl-heavy, I can only assume that is an outgrowth of its roots as a big Perl convention. Since Damian Conway was the best thing about OSCON, and Damian is speaking at FOSS4G2007, your choice is clear. :) We already have one "non open source" FOSS4G sponsor, in Safe Software, a company with a history of early open source inter-operation (first proprietary support for PostGIS, for example). They won't be the only one, either. This isn't a religious gathering, it's a topical one, so as long as the presentations and displays are on topic ("about open source") that is fine with me. I don't have much truck with pseudo-open source companies though (the ones who use the term to brand things which clearly are not open source). That's just intellectual hijacking.