Thanks to all for an interesting conversation. At one point I asked three adjacent counties in N. Calif for GIS data. County 1 just said "here is the already public ftp site, knock yourself out", County 2 said "Pay us 1000's of dollars" and County 3 sent us a free CD, but made us fax a bunch of paperwork back and forth first.
> I agree with you, but it is hard to talk about freely available data without > also talking about the liability associated with publishing the data. > "Free" can be a relatively easy sell compared to "Free without license > agreement". I don't know if they have been tested in the courts, but there are a plethora of Gnu license agreements out there that should fit the bill. No one would mind someone agreeing to indemnify you. Is there no Gnu license contract for data? > I think what it comes down to is that it doesn't matter how easy or cheap a > solution is if you find yourself unable to maintain business continuity when > key staff leaves. There are opportunities for open source server side > solutions, and sometimes forced switches (such as end-of-line technology) > present re-greened fields, but in general the lack of a trained workforce > and (understandable) resistance from users familiar with proprietary systems > really limit open source adoption. All I want from any data provider is an ftp source with shapefiles in zip bundles, and for them to get the prj files is right. This doesn't really take much staff, though, yes, it takes some. W _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
