On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Nathan Woodrow <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm starting to wonder if anything becoming a OGC is a good thing. > > What impact would this have on QGIS?
For QGIS it would mean you could create a way to read GeoServices REST API-compliant data from servers. The specification would be open and so you could check your implementation against the spec to make sure your code is creating the right requests. However, unless an open-source implementation of the server is available, you won't be able to test it against a real server unless you pay up, or are beholden to the good nature of someone who has paid up. Imagine testing the WMS code in Qgis only by inspecting the URL it creates, and not by whether a WMS server returns the image you were expecting. There's a slight parallel with google and KML. Google bought the company that originally made Google Earth and so got all the code for KML files. They went to OGC and got KML made a standard, but, unlike Esri, released libKML as open source. Perhaps if Esri released their GeoServices REST API server as open source I think we'd be a bit happier (once we came round from the shock). [this discussion is also going on a bit on the osgeo-discuss mailing list, I've tried to focus on the impact on QGIS here rather than on the FOSS Geo community at large. Plenty of other people making those points!] Barry _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
