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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Joy of this, Joy of that
Date: 29 Nov 2024 19:32:07 GMT
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On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 04:48:40 -0500, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

> My last org did use ESRI - there has to be a muta-acronym
>    for "rip off LOTS of money because we CAN".

They do that very well. There are alternatives like QGIS and the 
associated GDAL tools, leaflet for JavasScript pages, and MapServer but 
like OBM and Windows nobody ever got fired for using Esri. 

>    Took one or two classes - but the product was changing so fast they
>    were just useless.

The transition from 8.x to 9.x was painful. I went to a seminar that was 
mostly Forest Service people and they were not happy when they were told 
it wasn't an easy migration. 9.x to 10.x made some changes in the way an 
application initialized the license but it was mostly incremental 
improvements. 10.x to 11.x was a breaking change. 10.x was 32-bit and they 
went completely to 64-bit. 

It wasn't exactly a surprise. Jack Dangermond always had a vision of 
moving everything to the cloud (ArcGIS Online) and wasn't shy about 
outlining the future in his presentations. The users got dragged along 
kicking and screaming.

>    Oddly, my previous boss and I wanted to WRITE a GIS way back in the
>    mid 80s ... but the subject was too deep and we never really got to
>    it.

The company I work for did develop a GIS system in the '90s. The database 
used was dbVista which had advantages over the hybrid DBase shapefiles 
Esri used. However the dispatch software was the product, not the 
underlying GIS. Around 2005 more sites were using Esri and we offered it 
as an option and eventually it dominated.

Typically a dispatch center does not have their own geodata. A county or 
municipality uses Esri for their own purposes and we grab centerline and 
landmark data from them. That has the advantage of picking up new data 
long before it trickles down to Google, TIGER/Line, HERE or any of the 
other sources.