LINUX REDUX

April 1, 2003
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We had quite a few letters this past week regarding last week's editorial on Open Source GIS and Linux and I thought I would pass along some of those comments.It obviously struck a cord with many of you and I can foresee that future discussion may be warranted.As always, we welcome articles of any topic and please contact me if you would like to submit a more technical brief on your experiences with Linux and other open source GIS products.So, here is a recap of some of the comments by readers (The full text of each letter can be read at LETTERS:
  • Safe Supports Linux: Safe Software supported Linux as a platform for our FME product since 1994.For us, it's a fast Unix development environment, and we've always had some customers that choose to deploy FME on Linux - they tend to choose it as an inexpensive but high performance platform for pushing a lot of data around.We were amongst a small number of companies adopting Linux in those early times.Our own VP of Development even wrote a 2500-word introductory article about Linux for Canada's free monthly "The Computer Paper" (which has since been absorbed into "Canada Computes," though the article itself can still be found at http://bbs.bbc.org/newsletter/aug94nl/linux.html). FME for Linux is currently still built on an old GCC 2.91.66 running on RedHat 6.2.-- Dale Lutz, Safe Software
  • Bundaberg City Council in Queensland Australia: Here at Bundaberg City Council in Queensland Australia we are using GenaMap.Their website is www.genaware.com. We have been running our corporate GIS on Linux for about 2 years, prior to this GenaMap was running on a Digital Alpha and HP-UX.They are now pushing Linux as their preferred operating system.
  • DM Solutions: Our company now implements all of our solutions with open source technologies.We have 12 full time staff and 6 contractors who work with us on a regular basis.We are the prime developers of the open source MapServer product from the University of Minnesota, with approximately 75% of the core development of the product completed by our staff.If you are interested in information about our approach to Open Source within the GIS industry, I'd recommend having a read over a document on our web site which you can find at: http://www.dmsolutions.ca/techserv/opensource.html -- Dave McIlhagga, DM Solutions.

  • Who will deliver a mainstream GIS product on Linux first? Maybe in the next 10 years, when GIS becomes more mainstream throughout the enterprise, we will see such animals.In the near term, I expect GIS vendors to keep their proprietary source code in the vault -- Ray Bivens, Northrop Grumman IT, TASC
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