Off in the land of beer and pizza…
… we’re making excellent, industrial software too. Jeff seems to dismiss the notion that self-organized software development can provide the same level of quality or standing that closed-source, cathedral-style software can. Readers of my weblog should be able to fill in my arguments against this idea without me even having to write them 
Speaking of beer and pizza, if ESRI ever wants developers to go out and sell their products for them, they need to quit charging for EDN. As ESRI moves to selling server-focussed software, they need to realize that *developers* are the people they should be marketing to. Yes, the developers don’t hold the purse strings, but if you give the developers the ability to build out a one-off that demonstrates specific organizational functionality, your sales job is done. As it stands now, I think developers are one-off’ing in OpenLayers, MapServer, FeatureServer, GeoServer, and PostGIS. My evidence is completely anecdotal, but I’ve noticed a continuing stream of curious developers showing up and asking very basic questions how to get going. ESRI’s missing these folks, and in my opinion should be taking the same tact with developers that Oracle does. Otherwise, a day or two of fiddling with OpenLayers doesn’t cost $1500 like an EDN seat does…
Even having EDN doesn’t get you much. One fairly serious security-related bug has been stuck in my craw for over a year, and even though I have an EDN seat, I don’t have “support” and I’m not allowed to file bugs. This is completely ridiculous. I wasn’t asking to have my hand held through installing ArcGIS Server. Instead, I was filing a very clear and easy to demonstrate bug. Had this been an Open Source project, I would have filed the bug *with* the patch to fix it as well. Currently, my only hope is to make enough noise on places like this weblog in the hopes of guilting or shaming someone to notice and fix it
November 29th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Your point is actually incorrect.
1) I have actually pursued space for open source columns in at least one magazine, so different people could have the opportunity to voice their thoughts and endeavors.
2) Our magazine is at least partially using open source (and endeavoring to support it monetary wise). View the site and see for yourself.
November 29th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
http://www.google.com/search?q=joomla+beer+pizza
More than 200,000 results.
November 29th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
What was that saying about squeaky wheels?
http://forums.esri.com/Thread.asp?c=2&f=1718&t=212867&mc=3#732668
November 30th, 2007 at 7:54 am
- what was that saying about squeaky wheels? not too much. a blog posting a year after an issue is raised causes large software company to note problem in issue tracking database - i’ll stick with pizza and beer!
December 11th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
ESRI will let you submit a bug even if your maintenance has lapsed. Use this form and select the “Report a software defect” radio button: http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=homepage.requestSupport.gateway&ESRISessionID=R3vQC8VlZKPVwD5b7Ml1BATn68EzxZ0noBaLtVpqJ9Z%2DUePvJVhnfSYdHsunmCxDUw%3D%3D
December 11th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Oops…here’s a better link, one with out my sessionID in the url: http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=homepage.requestSupport.gateway
December 17th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
@ The Messanger
ESRI will let you submit a bug even if your maintenance has lapsed.
I think it would be ridiculous if ESRI was forbidding bug reports for users who do not have EDN or support subscibtions. Normally, users are not supposed to pay for contributing to software development, regardless if we are talking about closed, open source, proprietary, etc. software development. ESRI should be just thankful for bug reports.