GIS Community Blocks Esri's Geospatial 'Open Standard' REST API 53
Bismillah writes "The developer of ArcGIS, Esri, has dropped its bid to have the GeoServices REST API recognized as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium, after a community backlash against 'providing a vendor with significant market advantage, erring on the creation of a state-sanctioned monopoly.'"
Re:Lesson learned (Score:3, Interesting)
ESRI is THE 800 pound gorilla in GIS.
The FOSS offerings are pretty cool, but I see no "black swan" like MySQL was to Oracle DB coming along in that space any time soon.
Re:Lesson learned (Score:4, Interesting)
Ok, serious questions here. Are there _technical_ reasons for hating GRASS? It does have a butt-ugly UI, but it's extremely flexible, extensible and it's designed with a Unix-like philosophy in mind, with a collection of tools that do individual things but are well integrated with each other. I'm not saying it's perfect, but then again neither is ArcGIS.