I can say for Switzerland that Open Source GIS is more and more used in conjunction with commercial GIS, in some cases, in governmental GIS, people use primarily Open Source GIS.
Also, in many cases, people don't care which tools are used. If the responsible persons have knowledge in Open Source GIS they are free to use it, as long as the results are at least as good as with commercial GIS. I think that Postgis together with ESRI and/or Autodesk (if FDO is improved and mature) are compelling combinations. And it opens up the possibility to use OS desktop GIS as well, such as QGIS/uDig, etc, for smaller and simpler projects. All from the same sources. This, however, requires that one doesn't use proprietary technologies, such as ArcSDE. Fortunately, ArcSDE is expensive, which means that many smaller projects can't afford it anyway. Another compelling combo is a OS desktop GIS, such as QGIS/uDig in combination with GRASS. Andreas > Hi, > > As a GIS industry newcomer, I'm in process of prioritizing my research > steps, selecting tools and technologies that would be mostly essential > and relevant for future job search. > > Concerning client software it is quite simple - without ArcGIS you'll > definitely would be out of range. But server mapping has several > possibilities - whether to focus on spatial databases - mostly Oracle > Spatial or PostGIS, or to look for server middleware like > GeoServer\MapServer or Oracle MapViewwer. I'm from Oracle space, so > their products are mostly familiar to me. > > I like PostGIS for its simplicity, free availability and great community > support. I've already made some demo stands with uDig\qgis with PostGIS > backend and tuned GeoServer to work with PostGIS layers. But the > question is - are there serious business demand for OpenGIS profies? > monster.co.uk, reed.co.uk and gis-jobs.co.uk return no (zero) jobs with > postgis keyword. > > What whould you suggest? > > Thanks and best regards, > Alex > > > _______________________________________________ > postgis-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users > -- Andreas Neumann Böschacherstrasse 6, CH-8624 Grüt/Gossau, Switzerland Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Web: * http://www.carto.net/ (Carto and SVG resources) * http://www.carto.net/neumann/ (personal page) * http://www.svgopen.org/ (SVG Open Conference) * http://www.geofoto.ch/ (Georeferenced Photos of Switzerland) _______________________________________________ postgis-users mailing list [email protected] http://postgis.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/postgis-users
