Open Source

Editor in Chief Joe Francica picked out the top articles from the Directions Magazine archives. The criteria was a balance between "editor's choice" articles, and those that were most popular according to our reader statistics. If you missed them the first time around - here's an opportunity to catch up!

Directions Magazine’s Editor in Chief Joe Francica and Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg batted around .500 on their predictions for 2011. Can they keep up the pace for 2012 and do their bold predictions offer insights into the trends that will shape the geospatial marketplace next year?

This comprehensive, detailed article by Nicolas Gignac of the Québec Ministry of Public Safety describes how the organization is leveraging open source and open standards. This approach helps make it possible for many organizations to work together to quickly locate any incident, analyze hotspots, make simple geospatial requests and maintain a "common operating picture" during incidents by updating geographic features in real-time.

Ken Yanow is a professor of Geographical Sciences at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California and an advocate of open source software in the classroom. In the coming months, he will write a series of articles for Directions Magazine on his experiences with various products in the classroom. In this initial article, he offers an introduction to the use of open source software and why educators might want to consider it.

What's it like to teach using free and open source GIS? Kurt Menke runs his own GIS consulting business in Albuquerque, New Mexico and also teaches at Central New Mexico Community College. He has developed a course called "Introduction to Open Source GIS and Web Mapping." In this article, he describes the impetus behind the course development, details the course content and offers some of the lessons he's learned in the process.

The topic of open data has come to the Netherlands on the wave of Gov2.0. Will it succeed? Columnist Jan Willem van Eck offers his thoughts.

The FOSS4G conference was held in Denver, Colorado last week and Editor in Chief Joe Francica provided blog and Twitter reports from the event. The blog reports are captured in their entirety in this article.

This year’s FOSS4G event is set for September 12-16, 2011 in Denver. Directions Magazine asked event chair, Peter Batty, to speak to the “state of technology” as well as a “state of the conference.”

This is part two of a two-part article about open source software licenses, risks related to intellectual property and governance. In part one, author Ignacio Guerrero, IT consultant and former software director at Intergraph and Rolta, examined software licenses, their impact and risk to intellectual property. This article looks at the elements of open source governance and risk management.

Did you ever wonder how geospatial software developers get into that line of work? In this interview, CloverPoint’s Amber Weber sits down with Martin Davis, the primary designer and developer of the JTS Topology Suite.Davis,who will be presenting at the 2011 FOSS4G conference, talks about his growth into a developer and his work on JTS Topology Suite and JUMP. Their discussion will be of interest to students, career changers, geo software users and open source fans alike.