[LINK] ISP's thrown $20 million bone by DCITA

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Hmmm....
> Of course the best way to actually achieve the end of it being both a 
> worthwhile piece of software and available on all operating systems 
> would be to create it as an Open Source project.
Well, perhaps.

There are good experiences with FOSS and bad ones. I'm having both 
simultaneously; Puppy Linux is *so* good that the kids haven't noticed 
their machine no longer runs Windows; they think the desktop changed and 
that's it.

MySQL is the prop and stay of my day-to-day life, and I wouldn't give it 
up for anything.

Then again. I have been trying to teach myself GIS in the open source 
world, rather than laying out a couple of grand for a commercial package 
for occasional use. FOSS GIS (in my case, currently Grass-GIS but it's 
both the first I tried and the fifth) *sucks*.

Grass-GIS is seriously unusable, seriously inflexible, written 
by-and-for the developer without thought of the "outside" user, and has 
without exception the worst UI I have ever encountered (yes, in case 
anyone says so, I have tried the 'easy' front ends like QGIS. They make 
life worse).

So I'm ambivilant about the assertion that making the filtering software 
open source would achieve its end.

RC