FOSS4G Day #3
Let the games begin!
At the opening plenary, Peter Batty again took the conference to the “neutral zone” and talked about evaluating all software, open source and proprietary, on a level playing field. Does it do what you need, is it supported, does it have a development future, it is a reasonable price? Good things to think about while evaluating options!
Arnulf Cristl covered the OSGeo point of view, how the organization brings together the diverse communities of open source GIS into an cooperative organization to promote the general growth and health of open source geospatial.
And finally, I got to spend 20 minutes on stage talking about open source business models. As usual, it was a harrowing but enjoyable experience to talk to so many people at once! Video? Of course there’s a video, many thanks to the conference organizers for capturing it.
After the plenary, the technical sessions began and I started off with a recap of the state of the PostGIS project, then sat down to take in a case study from the Norwegian Forests agency. They are migrating from Oracle to PostGIS and have built a clever tool to allow them to replicate from their Oracle to their PostGIS instance during the long period in which they have to run both system simultaneously. Change takes time!
Unfortunately, for the rest of the day I had meetings on the floor and elsewhere, so I took in no other talks to report on! The energy in the conference, on the floor and in the plenaries so far has been amazing. I am tempted to do my best Juan Antonio Samaranch impression and declare Denver to be the “best FOSS4G ever!” Here are some pictures from the conference.
Tags: foss4g2011, recap