James Fee GIS Blog

I’ve gotten a ton of email about this subject (probably more than anything but ArcGIS Explorer) and I’ll pass along some interesting tidbits. First it would appear that many Autodesk MapGuide users are referring to the product as Autodesk MapServer, not MapServer Enterprise (apparently Autodesk puts their name in front of every product they have). Guess it didn’t take long to forget about MapServer Cheetah. Anyway, Adena has a couple of good quotes from yesterday, but this was my favorite :

”AJAX is a complex development environment.”
Autodesk staffer on why MapServer Studio is a necessity

Frank Warmerdam (via IRC) also has some good insight into why Autodesk announced MapServer Enterprise before everyone was ready:

[11/29/2005 9:20 PM] frankw Autodesk was quite worried that if ESRI found out, they would open source ArcIMS ahead of them.

If Autodesk thinks that, then they don’t know their compeditor very well. While we’ve heard that ESRI might release parts of ArcIMS open source before, I’m sure they would never release the whole thing. There was also some misunderstanding of the reaction on Autodesk’s part:

[11/30/2005 8:40 AM] frankw Gary (Land) did say “We expected some of this reaction – think it’s mostly FUD owning to not knowing us”.

Hmm, I’m wondering how they didn’t expect this reaction. Guess they don’t know the community any better…

Probably the most interesting email I received was from a reader who wrote this:

”I’ve tried to convince many companies to use MapServer instead of ESRI products, but have always been told that MapServer is not approved by their IT staff. They only want to use ESRI for GIS and Autodesk for CAD. Now I can say Autodesk MapServer is an Autodesk application and just implement open source UMN MapServer instead. Still I need to be careful of Autodesk muscling in on my consulting business as they probably have better placed contacts with many of the companies I’m currently working for than I do. Maybe I need to take a closer look at and add ESRI products to my services.”

[tags]mapserver, mapserverfoundation, autodesk[/tags]