SWAT - SEA II Conference Soil and Water Assessment Tool - Southeast Asia

(With due deference to United States Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson) When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one GIS user group to dissolve the licensing agreements which have connected them with a proprietary software vendor and to assume among the free and open source GIS users of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the capabilities of Geospatial Software and Programming Principles entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that proprietary GIS software is not the only useful GIS software, that GIS software can be developed by programmers with certain un-patentable capabilities and functions, that among these are raster and vector data visualization, projection, overlay, and the pursuit of modeling. That to implement these capabilities, GIS software development teams are instituted among men, deriving their functional specifications from the needs of the end-users. That whenever any proprietary software company disregards the needs of end-users, it is the Right of the GIS Community to change software tools and to develop a new GIS software project, laying its foundation on such existing open source code and organizing its functions in such a form, as to them shall seem most likely to meet their analysis and modeling needs. Prudence indeed will dictate that GIS software licensing agreements long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown that GIS users are more disposed to suffer expensive contracts and problematic software while such evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the software to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of bloated software and limiting licenses, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute software dependency, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such software, and to provide new approaches for their future GIS work. [In short, this talk will discuss the growth of Free and Open Source GIS software and communities into powerful software stacks that can be implemented to the benefit by GIS users, technicians, analysts, and managers throughout the world. Particular emphasis will be given to the MapWindow GIS project: www.mapwindow.org.]