Dear all, it's a full month that I stopped following actively the grass-user (and other foss4g) list(s). I am back and now, hopefully, more dynamic, more and more involved as an end-user and perhaps with limited advanced contributions.
I started following the list(s) in October 2007 (with a question about "fonts" [1] and) with "MORE questions" (November 2007 [2]) and the statement "I know that I only have questions (and a lot). Hope this will change in time...". I still have questions :-). And I'll always do. Although I feel that I didn't do enough, I tried to put a small piece of grain in this piece of Art named GRASS-GIS and maybe less in other foss4g projects. I feel happy and satisfied that this period (October 2007 - November 2008) was so fruitful from the perspective of gaining knowledge and experiences in the field of GIS as never before in my life. It was also my intention to kind of celebrate it somehow last December (2008)... (oh, I always have my crazy ideas:-). But I had to drop them and concentrate to the political situation back home in Greece. We only then wake-up when we see (literally and metaphorically) fires burning our home. We are blinded and cannot see what is happening the last 4 decades and more which lead in today's fires. Not only in my country but on a global scale. The values of transparency and meritocracy that are trying to be realised in the foss4g projects kept me working with foss4g all this time and I cannot think alternatives for the moment. Those two important values are absent today, in many dimensions of the wide real world. I even started to parallelize, keeping of course in mind the enormous difference between a socio-political and a foss(4g) organisation scheme, the open-source concept by putting basic *political* questions with respect to Democracy (here I mean real/ideal Democracy and not today's pseudo-Democracy). (I understand politics as the right to express freely my thoughts and more important to be free to doubt directly and the established system at any time.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Questions like: What makes a person a member in the GRASS-GIS community for example? The subscription in a mailing-list? Programing and/or bug-hunting? Donating some amount of money in the project? Are the foss4g projects really autonomous? Are they really self-determined? Can really a member of a foss4g community doubt anytime any established "rule"? Can he speak-out anything he considers to be the right way to go? Is there room to improve the fundamental scheme of interaction between the members of a foss4g community? Does really *anybody*, equipped with the basics (a pc, internet access) have real access to the thesaurus of knowledge accumulated through the development and use of foss4g? What are the effects and the benefits on society? How does GRASS-GIS survive? Who cares about it's financial sources, planning? etc. What's the situation in the real world? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I wish you all a Healthy new year. Thank you for this wonderful living community, Nikos --- [1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/2007-October/041690.html [2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-user/2007-November/041701.html _______________________________________________ grass-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user
