Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
Having read through this thread, I think Dave's suggestion is spot on. This Service Providers Directory (SPD) is an excellent resource, but what it is missing is the ability to send updates or news... It seems pretty clear that there are people here who are [at least mildly] offended by seeing advertisements on this list. I would bet, however, that there are also many people on this list who are [at least mildly] interested in receiving this sort of update. The idea to create a new list specifically for this sort of posting cleanly solves this problem. It delivers pertinent information to those who are interested and bothers not the rest. --e On 1/18/08, Dave Patton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Arnulf Christl wrote: [snip a bunch of really good stuff - thanks Arnulf] Does this mean that all businesses providing this kind of service should now spam this list with their latest announcements? http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo OSGeo-Announce: OSGeo Announcements and News OSGeo-Discuss: OSGeo Discussions Therefore, how about adding something like OSGeo-SPD-News: Announcements, News, and Press Releases from members of the OSGeo Service Provider Directory Having such a list would then preclude sending those types of materials on OSGeo-Discuss. -- Dave Patton System Developer National Forest Inventory Pacific Forestry Centre Natural Resources Canada Degree Confluence Project: Canadian Coordinator Technical Coordinator http://www.confluence.org/ OSGeo FOSS4G2007 conference: Workshop Committee Chair Conference Committee member http://www.foss4g2007.org/ Personal website: Maps, GPS, etc. http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/ ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
+1 on no advertising or announcements on this list. I agree that it may sound churlish to stop good organizations from sending good information to good people; I also agree that allowing it would diminish the usefulness of this list. If the web page of offerings is not enough, then maybe set up a separate list for that kind of thing. +1 on Arnulf's analysis of freely provided course materials. MIT started the Open Course Ware (OCW) movement a few years ago[1] and it certainly has not cut back on MIT's ability to attract customers, i.e. students. In fact, it has spawned a mini-industry of other universities putting their materials online[2]. Allan [1] http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm [2] http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=12Itemid=26 On Jan 18, 2008, at 7:58 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote: Howard Butler wrote: On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote: If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra credibility and marketing reach. Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the public domain and give them away for free for extra credibility? What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an intensive training session? Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give back our 2Ct contribution. To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts * Students * Professionals Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having course material released under an open and free license. These are: * Clients (~users, as categorized above) * Creators (for example the WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce Intellectual Property) * the FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training material (here MapServer and PostGIS). A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to explain the dependencies. 1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but unquestionably there. 2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask - Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen because universities and educational personnel are still in the late sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat it as Intellectual Property you will be the only idiot who invests keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give (FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)? 3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try and learn by themselves with freely available material because they have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
Howard Butler wrote: On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote: If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra credibility and marketing reach. Why? Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the public domain and give them away for free for extra credibility? What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an intensive training session? Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give back our 2Ct contribution. To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts * Students * Professionals Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having course material released under an open and free license. These are: * Clients (~users, as categorized above) * Creators (for example the WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce Intellectual Property) * the FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training material (here MapServer and PostGIS). A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to explain the dependencies. 1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but unquestionably there. 2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask - Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen because universities and educational personnel are still in the late sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat it as Intellectual Property you will be the only idiot who invests keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give (FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)? 3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try and learn by themselves with freely available material because they have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us anyway. All folks from these three groups will see who created the course material and will memorize them as the experts on the topic. The GNU FDL license has a clause where invariant sections can be defined, typically this could be the front page and back cover, there you can find the authors, company logo and web site links or the creators' individual address, contacts. Link to the repository where the document is maintained, mailing list or whatever you want to advertise as important for this publication. Therefore our competitors who offer the same training courses with our material (Outrageous! My Property) always advertise us as the real real experts. Who're you gonna ask if you really wanna know? Lastly - and so important that I cannot stress this enough - obviously the Software Project is going to profit. Because the largest open gash in FOSS' outward image is missing, rotten and wrong documentation and training materials. If you
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
Allan Doyle wrote: +1 on no advertising or announcements on this list. I agree that it may sound churlish to stop good organizations from sending good information to good people; I also agree that allowing it would diminish the usefulness of this list. If the web page of offerings is not enough, then maybe set up a separate list for that kind of thing. +1 on Arnulf's analysis of freely provided course materials. MIT started the Open Course Ware (OCW) movement a few years ago[1] and it certainly has not cut back on MIT's ability to attract customers, i.e. students. In fact, it has spawned a mini-industry of other universities putting their materials online[2]. Folks, I'd note I advised OTG to drop a message about their offering to the discuss list, so they were acting in what they believed to be good faith. I still think it is appropriate for folks to briefly introduce new open source related training offerings here, but I shall avoid suggesting this in the future since there are clearly different opinions. The SPD does not give much granularity for describing things like training courses. Perhaps at some point we can have a wiki page pointing off to various training options available for OSGeo related technologies. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training
MORRISVILLE, NC - January 8, 2008 - Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS UMN MapServer Training The Open Technology Group (OTG), the leader in the development and delivery of training solutions centered about Open Source technologies, announced today the addition of its Introduction to GIS with PostGIS MapServer course to its wide range of PostgreSQL related course offerings. Implementing GIS solutions can be a daunting task said Chander Ganesan, President Our Introduction to GIS with PostGIS MapServer course covers the concepts, administration tools, and techniques necessary to quickly and efficiently implement these solutions using PostGIS, PostgreSQL, and UMN MapServer to visualize results. Furthermore, it allows our customers a wider range of customization options for our on-site course offerings. OTG continues to deliver the most comprehensive set of public-enrollment PostgreSQL courses in the world said Ganesan, and our customers are able to mix and match components of our courses to meet their specific goals for affordable on-site delivery to groups of 4 or more students. The Introduction to GIS with PostGIS MapServer course covers the following topics: - GIS Fundamentals/Concepts - Installing PostGIS - PostGIS Data Loads (Shape File Imports) - PostGIS Features - Creating PostGIS Tables Loading Data - Simple PostGIS Queries (Simple Features for SQL) - Visualizing PostGIS Results - Deploying UMN MapServer - Implementing Interactive Maps ABOUT OPEN TECHNOLOGY GROUP, INC. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in Morrisville, NC, the Open Technology Group, Inc. (OTG) has established itself as the leading provider of training solutions centered about Open Source software and solutions. With its comprehensive library of in-house developed intellectual property, OTG is able to deliver comprehensive, customized, and structured training covering a wide range of software solutions. The Open Technology Group offers affordable customized on-site technology training throughout the world, as well as public-enrollment courses at its headquarters in Morrisville, NC as well as at a wide range of partner locations worldwide. For more information, a schedule of upcoming courses, and a complete course catalog, visit us online at http://www.otg-nc.com, or contact us at 877-258-8987 . ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
