From: Eric Wolf ------------------------------------------------------ I will personally buy a beer for any CHUGALUGers who make the trek out to Denver next month for FOSS4G (or even State of the Map)! http://2011.foss4g.org/ What is FOSS4G? Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial! FOSS4G is the premier conference for users and developers of open source software for geospatial applications. Here are some examples: OpenLayers - the go-to web mapping interface Geoserver - the reference platform for OGC WFS standard PostGIS - spatially enabled RDBMS built on to of Postgres. GRASS - before Envi, ERDAS and ArcGIS, the Army built their GIS on GRASS. It's been fully open source since 1995! QGIS (uDig, OpenJump, etc) - are serious desktop GIS applications The Geospatial Market is unique relative to open source software. For instance, there are only two widely used spatial RDBMS - Oracle and Postgres. There are no viable commercial alternatives to OpenLayers because it just owns the market. GeoServer and MapServer dominate the spatial data server market in a way that rivals Apache in the web server market. Even the 800-pound gorilla, Esri, fesses up to including the GDAL/OGR library as a key component in ArcGIS. Additionally, ArcGIS includes Python with every install! And this is the first time since 2007 that FOSS4G has been in North America! Last year was Barcelona, Spain. Before that, Sydney, Australia. Before that Cape Town, South Africa. Next year will be either Prague or Beijing. This conference covers some serious geography! So come on out to Denver. I'm buying the beer! -Eric Wolf -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=- Eric B. Wolf 720-334-7734