uDig ain’t ArcGIS quite yet.

I picked the sentence “uDig ain’t ArcGIS quite yet.”from Paul Ramsey’s blog. A certain user picked up udig to conclude that his shop would not move to the opensource  enviornment in the near future.

Paul said that If you want people to switch you need to make the transition as painless as possible. Firefox got people to switch to IE by

• *Making better software
• *Not making user learn a new UI for interacting with the web
• *importing all their IE favorites
• *THEN building in cool new features that keep people around

So, uDig Team have to do is make something better than ArcGIS, but not so much better that it is not familiar to the existing user base, that works transparently with all their existing data and presumably their .mxd files too. And meanwhile give it away for free.

Paul said, Open source is not about users, it is about developers. It is only about users in so far as users become sufficiently engaged in the project that they either become developers themselves, or support developers through careful bug finding or documentation.

At last, Paul describe the correct models by his point of view. He said that the FireFox or Open Office are incorrect modles, because they are something a litte aberrate. Paul said the correct models are Linux, Apache, Perl, PostgreSQL，not user-friendly, but still very useful.

Related posts:

• 2007 FOSS4G will be held in Victoria, Canada, Sept. 24-27.
• Making heatmap for Arcgis Flex API
• Open Workbench — an Alternative Way of the Project Management
• SWIK — the wiki of opensource software.
• HeatMap Plugin for ArcGIS Flex API