stephen white wrote:
I am repeatedly amazed at the number of people in here who keep trying to set up groups, create specifications, write documentation, write books, and do everything except actually work on GIS.
Stephen, I agree about the tendency of breeding (too) many standards but actually not working on providing good reference implementations of them nor setting up test beds for implementations. But, I can not agree about books and documentation because I see this is the (one of many) Achilles' heel of Open Source Software, especially GIS where non trivial features are implemented but never well documented. It's pretty easy to sit down and implement an algorithm, but after the code is working, nobody cares about documenting it well and presenting how to use it. Just an example, can you find easily how to start using GEOS (http://geos.refractions.net) in your application? Let's compare GIS stuff to Boost libraries. The latter does a lot of very complex things and it's not a single but a set of libs, so IMHO it's comparable to FOSS GIS libraries. Now, check the Boost documentation: http://boost.org/more/getting_started.html http://boost.org/libs/libraries.htm and show me equivalently well written docs for existing FOSS GIS library(ies). :-) To make the story short, IMHO we have almost *no* good documentation for FOSS GIS. It's a fun to hack the software but documenting it is boring, so nobody wants to do it, but we are in a bloody need for it ;-)
Too many managers, not enough workers. Nobody wants to be the workers, so they set up committees, set up conferences, write articles, and never actually pull their finger out and set finger to keyboard (yeergh) for code.
Actually, I have completely opposite observations. Greetings -- Mateusz Loskot http://mateusz.loskot.net _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
