On Tuesday (Oct 14th 2014) I ended up in a church. No – it didn’t explode. It should have though. 
I ended up listening to about an hour and a half talk by Richard Stallman. For those of you not informed – He’s an old guy. An old guy that wrote the GPL. He started the Free Software Foundation. He’s done a lot of good in the world. I would say crazy – and we need crazy people that push things.
I’ve read a lot about him – so the talk wasn’t anything ground breaking – I think for a lot in the audience it probably was way different. I think the most fascinating thing first off – UGA Didn’t bring him to Athens. A local non profit had to run a campaign to get him here….and luckily UGA did take a bit out of their proceeds by not donating the space where the talk was held.
I’ve been doing this talk and I’m about done – I give myself three “appearances” with one talk and this one is about done. I cover Open Source – or as Dr Stallman prefers Free Software – and how it can be successfully mixed in a proprietary environment. That phrase kept losing the crowd – Free. It refers to the four freedoms of software – not the price.
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
We in GIS are hung on non free software. My talk mentioned above (which I need to put on slideshare or something) covers using Free Software with ESRI Software (since they are the 900lb Gorilla in the room). The talk was born out of the problem that most GIS consultants are really GIS Software salesmen. When I started consulting that seemed to be my “goto” phrase: Well you’ve got to buy ArcGIS first….. . Seven years ago – yeah – I will give me a pass on that. Now not so much with the availability of QGIS, PostGIS, Geoserver, and a whole slew of OSGEO projects in the pipeline. Now life is flexible enough you could write about whatever you needed if you were so inclined. I’m still just a passable hack at programming so that’s not my lot in life.
Takeaways from the talk……
- Facebook is one giant evil entity (I agree)
- Amazon isn’t much better (agree to an extent)
- Ubuntu is a blight on the Gnu/Linux Landscape. I have heartburn over this one. I want to switch to debian – but I’m a consulting shop that is pushing the limits of viability with my current setup. I scream Open Source in a land of ArcGIS. I refuse to go Mac…I want more current packages than what debian provides….and I’ve done as much as possible to strip anything out of Ubuntu that reports back information to Canonical. Gasp I even like the Unity Desktop…although I still have found thoughts of openbox.
- Cell phones are a pain for multiple reasons. So much so Dr Stallman doesn’t carry one.
- Open Source is phrase to get away from Free Software. Open Source is marketing which is moving away from the 4 freedoms of software……which is absolutely beautiful. It’s true. ESRI is even talking open source (or something…I’m not sure what they are doing).
Overall last night was pretty good. We need the guys questioning why. I hope to continue that a bit with GIS.
