Thanks, Peter, for the interesting opinions, but I see them as further divergence into other matters, not a discussion of my statement.
I'd love to discuss all issues you mention some time. Did I ever tell
you I owe my professor position to my open source contributions? Are
there others on this list with similar experiences?
On 21/05/16 09:56, Peter Baumann wrote:
> Hm, first of all: this is opening a different thread, talking about
> functionality of rasdaman community. Next, it is based on assumptions -
> without details (because off topic): conclusions are wrong.
>
> But to respond to the core message emphasized in the first paragraph: I
> respectfully disagree. In particular, such a position does not benefit
> the open source community very much as I am trying to explain below.
>
> TL;DR:
>
> You have a strong expertise in Geoinformatics, I know something about
> Computer Science. This is where we can talk as professors and
> scientists. Your statement is about economics, industry etc. Having an
> opinion there (and articulate it) is fair, but in these fields our
> opinion weighs not more than anyone else's in the street. We should not
> attempt to attain importance through inapplicable roles.
>
> Let us look at a professor. They have a conveniently high salary which
> is paid by society, that is: tax payers. Nobody can influence what a
> professor does and how much return s/he generates for society.
>
> A single open source developer (or a small group, whatever) do not
> experience this convenience. They have a dream where they invest, they
> try to not make money for getting richer than a professor ;-) but merely
> for their economic survival. Some (in particular scientists) enjoy the
> money rain coming from publicly funded projects (again: the tax payer
> subsidizes), but most in the community have to struggle hard. They face
> reluctant customers, competition by the giants in the market, and many
> more obstacles.
>
> From the cosy place of a lifelong position with a secured salary and
> decent retirement funds it is easy to say that all software should be
> free like free beer (quote from below: "can be reproduced by other
> scientists without prohibitive license costs").
>
> If the open source movement cannibalizes itself it will make it all so
> easy for the big players to maintain their dominance, they will silently
> applaud. Quoting Jeroen:
>> NEVER IGNORE COMPANIES AGAIN IN OSGEO OR FOSS4G! THEY ARE NOT A
> THREAT, THEY ARE A NECESSITY.
>
> That said: It is entirely ok to have the opinion you have. Others,
> though, may disagree. I am one of those.
>
> respectfully,
> Peter
>
>
>
> On 05/20/2016 09:30 AM, Edzer Pebesma wrote:
>> As a scientist, I teach my students that for doing science it is a
>> requirement to work with open source software, because only then
>> workflows are fully transparent and can be reproduced by other
>> scientists without prohibitive license costs. Currently, working
>> with large amounts of earth observation (EO) or climate model data
>> typically requires to download these data tile by tile, stitch them
>> together, and go through all of them. Array databases may simplify
>> this substantially: after ingesting the tiles, they can directly
>> work on the whole data as a multi-dimensinal array ("data cube").
>> Computations on these array are typically embarassingly parallel,
>> and scale up with the number of cores in a cluster.
>>
>> Rasdaman is an array data base that comes in two flavours, the open
>> source community edition (CE) and the commercial enterprise edition
>> (EE). The differences between the two are clear [1]. When I want to
>> use rasdaman CE (open source) for scalable image analysis, I get
>> stuck waiting for one core to finish everything [1]. This is not
>> going to solve any problems related to computing on large data,
>> and is not scalable. The bold claim that rasdaman.org opens with
>> ("This worldwide leading array analytics engine distinguishes itself
>> by its flexibility, performance, and scalability") is not true for
>> the CE advertised. This has been mentioned in the past on mailing
>> lists [2,3], but the typical answer from Peter Baumann diverts into
>> other arguments. Also the benchmark graph (photo from an AGU poster)
>> [4] that Peter sent this week [5] must refer to the enterprise
>> edition, since Spark and Hive both scale, but rasdaman CE does not [3].
>>
>> I assume that on the discussions on this list, ONLY the open
>> source community edition is considered, compared, and discussed,
>> as a potential future OSGeo project.
>>
>> OSGeo supports the needs of the open source geospatial community [6].
>>
>> Given
>>
>> * the bold claims and continuing confusion about whether,
>> and which, rasdaman is scalable,
>> * the need for OSGeo to give good advice to prospective users
>> about technologies that do scale EO data analysis,
>> * the current (unfilled!) needs of scientists for good, open source
>> software for such analysis, and
>> * the potential conflict of interest of its creator [7],
>>
>> I wonder wether OSGeo should recommend rasdaman CE to the open
>> source geospatial community.
>>
>>
>> [1] http://rasdaman.org/wiki/Features
>> [2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/incubator/2014-October/002540.html
>> [3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rasdaman-users/66XL3tmDDQI
>> [4]
>> https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20160515/49200cd4/attachment.jpg
>> [5] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-May/016099.html
>> [6] http://www.osgeo.org/content/faq/foundation_faq.html
>> [7] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-May/016045.html
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Discuss mailing list
>> Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
> --
> Dr. Peter Baumann
> - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
> www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
> mail: p.baum...@jacobs-university.de
> tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
> - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 26793)
> www.rasdaman.com, mail: baum...@rasdaman.com
> tel: 0800-rasdaman, fax: 0800-rasdafax, mobile: +49-173-5837882
> "Si forte in alienas manus oberraverit hec peregrina epistola incertis ventis
> dimissa, sed Deo commendata, precamur ut ei reddatur cui soli destinata, nec
> preripiat quisquam non sibi parata." (mail disclaimer, AD 1083)
>
>
--
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster
Heisenbergstraße 2, 48149 Münster, Germany; +49 251 83 33081
Journal of Statistical Software: http://www.jstatsoft.org/
Computers & Geosciences: http://elsevier.com/locate/cageo/
Spatial Statistics Society http://www.spatialstatistics.info
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
