Archive for category Rant

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Posted by Jason Birch in Google, Rant on October 21, 2009

Ever have something you can’t get out of your head? How about two things?

The first thing stuck in my head is the idea that Google is moving wholesale into the content business. They aren’t creating their own content, but they aggregate external content into a “walled garden” and encourage users to host content on Google properties, both actions ensuring that value remains solely exploitable by Google. For product and service folks this won’t matter much, but for people reliant on web content for their income the contraction of the web into mega-portals is definitely a business threat to be aware of. I personally worry that this business tactic may affect the vitality of the web in the long run. Case-in-point, with the recent launch of the real estate layer in Google Maps, realtors are incented to funnel their listings through Google Base rather than posting them openly on the web as GeoRSS or KML. This echoes the aggregation that is occurring in Google’s “Place Pages“, and is a worrisome trend.

The other thing stuck in my head is that stupid Sesame Street pinball counting song… actually I kinda dig it, which is probably why it’s staying stuck.

What I really want to do is to stop thinking about these things. I figured that maybe if I combine the two it will help me exorcise both demons, so:

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-J

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Anti-Climate Dividend…

Posted by Jason Birch in Rant on June 24, 2008

Warning, totally off-topic and slightly political.

Well, you’d think I’d be happy. Our family got cheques from the BC provincial government totaling $400 as a Climate Action Dividend. So why am I annoyed?

Here’s a quote from the fancy “yay, we’re green” flier that came with each of the cheques (one for each adult):

By using 40% post consumer recycled paper for this project we saved… 262 trees, 10,780 kilograms of solid waste, 98,876 litres of water, 34,105 kilowatt hours of electricity, 19595 kilograms of greenhouse gases, 50 cubic meters of landfill space

Anyone else see anything wrong with that statement? Here it is in other words:

By using 60% non-recycled paper we… killed 393 trees, generated 16,160 kilograms of solid waste, wasted 148,467 litres of water, burned 51,157 of electricity, released 29,392 kilograms of greenhouse gases, and used up another 75 cubic metres of landfill space.

And that’s assuming (incorrectly) that the recycled portion of the paper came at zero environmental cost, and doesn’t take into account things like inks, electricity costs for printing presses and computer processing, etc, etc.

If you really want to give me money to help the environment, next time just set up a refundable tax credit for the following year. But I have a feeling that this was more about political marketing than a genuine desire to enact change.

-J

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Who writes history?

Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, Rant on June 26, 2007

About a year and a half ago, Autodesk entered into the open source geospatial community with an announcement that caused a storm of controversy and recrimination in the MapServer community. I thought that this had all been worked out, but Karel Cech just posted a semi-informed rant on the subject and brought it up again.

Here’s my measured response:

MapServer Enterprise is not another name for MapGuide Open Source. The brand is plain-and-simple MapGuide, and shouldn’t be referred to as anything else. Autodesk’s packaged commercial version is called MapGuide Enterprise. Perhaps this is what the ADSK representative was referring to?

To add a little clarification to Karel’s history… Back in 2005, the MapServer technical steering committee worked with Autodesk in an attempt to make Autodesk’s entry into open source geospatial a productive experience for both MapServer and for what would become MapGuide. Working in secrecy and failing to include the larger MapServer community in this effort had some nasty repercussions at the time (brand confusion, community turmoil, etc). However, Autodesk’s Gary Lang acted graciously throughout, and within a week had backed away from using the MapServer name. This, despite the weeks of effort it took the development team to re-brand, re-package, and re-test the code base, and despite the time and money that had already been spent marketing the new brand.

Since then, Autodesk has proven its commitment to open development processes. The MapGuide developers at Autodesk use Fogel’s Producing Open Source Software as a bible and conscientiously work with our user community to guide the future of MapGuide in as open a way as possible. They have also proven their commitment to the larger open source geospatial community through the ongoing funding and support of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. OSGeo acts as an umbrella organisation for MapGuide, MapServer, and many other leading-edge open source geospatial applications.

As Karel says, it’s great that there are several alternative geospatial server platforms available in the open source domain. I would certainly encourage anyone who requires a web mapping platform to properly evaluate MapGuide, MapServer, GeoServer and other open source geospatial platforms to determine which meets their needs. Choose the best tool for the job; choice is a huge part of the open source value proposition. But whatever you do, don’t dismiss any one of them based on a single inaccurate blog post.

Disclosure: I am a MapGuide Open Source Project Steering Committee member (though not speaking for the PSC here) and am NOT an Autodesk employee.

- J

P.S. MapGuide does offer a JSP Web API alongside its functionally equivalent PHP and ASP.Net interfaces. However, contrary to Karel’s claims, MapGuide is not built on Java. MapGuide is entirely coded in cross-platform C++, using SWIG to generate the user-facing web APIs. It leverages many of the same open source C-based libraries used by MapServer and other applications, such as Proj.4, GEOS and, indirectly, GDAL and OGR.

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