[R-sig-Geo] community support vs. corporate support

[Barry Rowlingson]

2009/1/17 van Etten, Jacob (IRRI) <J.vanEtten at cgiar.org>:
> Cathedrals were never based on grand design but on "ad hoc collective work" (David Turnbull) and bazaar economies are all about hiding (price) information (Clifford Geertz).

 And an analogy is like a box of chocolates - you never know what
you're gonna get, unless of course you read the little card that tells
you what shape chocolate is which flavour, at which point you know
exactly what you're gonna get, but by then the original point of your
analogy is long gone and you should just enjoy the chocolate. Oh yeah,
Chartres may have been built without plans but Wren's St Paul's
wasn't.

> The Shinto shrine is indeed an improvement in metaphor, I guess.

 Would have been nice to actually see it on the YouTube video :)

 On a related note I ran a course on Open Source Geospatial last
November, and Jason Jorgenson taught a session on Qgis and Grass. We
had a lot of Open Source newbies in the class, so Jason illustrated
the community support idea by showing an IRC log where at 09:12 he'd
submitted a bug report, and by 09:54 the bug had been fixed, the
source code patched, SVN updated, downloaded and compiled and it was
working for him. Sure that's a best case scenario, but I reckon a
one-hour response time from a commercial vendor would be pretty
unlikely...

Barry