Devil’s advocacy is a such an odd position for you

While Frank does contract to Autodesk, I don’t think that most people think of him as an Autodesk consultant. He’s got a pretty good reputation for making good technical choices independant of his commercial relationships.

Mateusz is not, to my knowledge, consulting to Autodesk. For the PostGIS provider, he is being jointly funded by the City of Nanaimo and Refractions Research. Unless there’s a side deal I’m unaware of

In the next while, the PSC should expand by two additional members. One of them will almost certainly be Haris Kurtagic, who is also independant. It’s quite possible that he has provided consulting services to Autodesk in the past though.

It’s hard to deal with this issue at this point in the project’s life. The majority of the active users have pre-existing relationships with Autodesk (either as consultants, employees, or clients). For instance, I think of myself as independant (I know I’ve caused some pain for Autodesk with some of my comments) but there are probably some in our community that see me as a corporate lackey.

I believe that in this case independance will have to be assesed by whether the individual members have enough personal integrity to guide the projects in the best interest of the community. Only time will be able to provide a true measurement of this.

The community is small enough right now, that filling the last PSC slot is a difficult question. Are you interested in joining the FDO community and helping to guide the project? I don’t think that anyone would question your indepedance

Jason

Different topic … I followed your link to the FDO PSC page. It names 3 Autodesk people, and two contractors to Autodesk. Indulge me in a bit of devil’s advocacy: how is that an independent PSC?

Guess it takes a Python user to see that. I’d be confused not having explicit methods, but I guess what you’re suggesting is an implied default method for these objects based on the context?

Does SWIG make that kind of thing impossible, or just difficult?

I’ll be posting more on an FDO app later today.

FDO is intriguing, but thanks to SWIG, the Python API is a clunker.

>>> oClasses.FindItem(”SewerPipe”)

is better done in Python like

>>> oClasses["SewerPipe"]

using Python’s mapping protocol. Similarly,

>>> schema = FdoFeatureSchema.Create(sSchemaName, sSchemaName)

should be

>>> schema = FdoFeatureSchema(sSchemaName, sSchemaName)