MapLinx or ESRI Buisness Map OSS Replacement

[Jon Pruente]

I agree that people like Shannon can cause political uneasyness, but
there are many in FOSS that can do the same.  Heck, Shannon is an
admitted Pink-Liberal-Pacifist.  Politically I'm 180 from him, but he
is brilliant in areas of computing.  He writes his own database
interfaces and drivers in hand coded assembly.  The community area of
BME, called IAM, has over 15,000 users and is a dynamic content
creation system with actives users literally all over the world.  He
had it running smoothly at that level on a P3 850 running Windows and
his hand coded software.  He has other sites of interest including
http://www.priceofhistoys.com/ http://www.undermars.com/ and his blog
(linked to IAM) at http://www.zentastic.com/

Aside from political differences (many people on BME/IAM oppose
some/many of his views) he is the one person I know who HAS done
location and mapping work, on his own, nearly by himself, and gotten
it to work.  That alone is somebody who should be consulted for a
project like this, regardless of his more extreme views.   I forgave
Linus for his fathers Communist sympathies years ago. :)

Jon.

On 11/16/06, Oren Beck <orenbeck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/16/06, Jon Pruente <jdpruente at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I know of a guy who has built his own mapping engines and put together
> > location data from public sources.  He's pretty busy, but he might at
> > least be able to shed light on certains topics if needed.  Shannon
> > Larratt has built many location fetures into bmezine.com and it's
> > sister sites.  He's also recently gone Linux and runs Xubuntu on his
> > laptop.  He's been moving to UNIX from Windows for a while.  He's done
> > some really nifty custom work, including a worldwide location mapper,
> > etc.
> >
>
>
> One warning- that link is potentially NSFW!
>
>
>
>
> I am of mixed feelings here- while ANY expansion of OSS  is good,
> appearances count too.
> Squicking the mundanes so deeply that they consider OSS to be entangled with
> the BM set is a risk. Then again- there is a  past example. In an attempt at
> image manipulation Edison proposed  AC for judicial executions. , To prove
> his DC system as "Safe" and the competing AC system as "Deadly" Edison
> purchased alternators and  donated them to prisons for use with electric
> chairs. The punch line however being that AC became the preferred current
> distribution method- even if only for practical considerations.
> So much for political grandstanding and technology playing off against each
> other.
> Let's hope I am being concerned about nothing.
>
> Oren
>
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