Archive for the ‘Reviews’ category

Supported Spatial Data Formats

October 15th, 2009

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GIS People often have to fight agains data conversions. The constellation of Desktop GIS suites make our life harder and harder while approaching to ETL processes. A relevant issue in ETL processes is the so called “data formats discovery”. Finding information about which software is supporting which spatial data type can turn a simple routing task into a “mission impossible” waist of time.

To overcome this inconvenient we can refer to the support guide of a famous ETL software: FME. FME is a complete spatial ETL solution that enables GIS Professionals to quickly translate, transform, integrate and distribute spatial data. In our case it simplifies our life by means of the “Supported Formats” guide.

Visiting this link [WWW] you may find a list of supported types from this software (quite a huge list!), however by clicking on each single data types you will be able to access to PDF version data sheets of each data source, complete of description, supported types, versions, and lot more.

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Choosing the perfect Free Software License

August 25th, 2009

Every time you start developing a new piece of software that needs external libraries to be used and integrated, the licensing dilemma strikes again. If you are a developer of a well standardized software company you can have stronger restrictions on the licenses to be used (even a list of usable licenses), however when you have to start your software from scratch, or start a software “business idea”, it is important to know something more on what you can take and what you can reuse without breaking somebody’s heart. I would like to dedicate this “in progress” post to collect in one page a brief description of the major families or licenses that can be used while developing free software but with possible commercial purposes! I hope it will help and I warmly advise anybody that would suggest any further detail to post a comment and I will be glad to integrate my content with that!

Apache License 2.0

  • Free Software
  • OSI Compatible
  • Linking from code with a different license
  • no Copyleft
  • GPL v3 Compatible

software can be redistributed in any other license, but should be noticed that Apache software is included
Two files that must be put at the top directory of redistributed software packages:

* LICENSE – a copy of the license itself.
* NOTICE – A “notice” text document listing the names of licensed libraries used, together with their developers.

In every licensed file, any original copyright or patent notices in redistributed code must be preserved, and in every licensed file changed a notification must be added stating that changes have been made to that file.

Gnu LGPL License

  • Free Software
  • OSI Compatible
  • Linking from code with a different license
  • Copyleft
  • GPL Compatible

an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.

primarly used for software libraries; has copyleft restrictions. it is something in between GPL and BSD/APACHE like licenses.

BSD Licenses

  • Free Software
  • OSI Compatible
  • Linking from code with a different license
  • no Copyleft
  • GPL Compatible

Eclipse Public License

  • Free Software
  • OSI Compatible
  • Linking from code with a different license
  • Copyleft
  • no GPL  Compatible

is designed to be business friendly. allows developers to create their own licenses on the portion of the codes that are added.

Academic Free License

  • Free Software
  • OSI Compatible
  • Linking from code with a different license
  • no Copyleft
  • GPL  Compatible unknown

considered redundant specifically to the Apache License 2.0

MIT License

considered a duplicate of BSD-like licenses

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the Italian @

May 9th, 2009

@

I was reading the New York Times, where I discovered an interesting article standing out again from the crowd of tech reviews. I’m always attracted by the searticles that describe Italians and Italian researches, since the objectivity of  NY Times journalists make easier to understand the real value of that piece of work. In this case the article was digging some years ago (nine to be precise) into “La Repubblica’s” archive which explained why the @ symbol was firstly used by italian merchants. A Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi used the symbol @ in a letter written 473 years ago today, on May 4, 1536. As prof. Giorgio Stabile (Full professor of   Science’s  history at “La Sapienza” university, Rome) explained to The Guardian in 2000, Francesco Lapi’s letter was sent from Seville to Rome and described the cargo on three ships that had just returned to Spain from Latin America:

“There, an amphora of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats,” Mr. Lapi informs his correspondent, representing the amphora with the now familiar symbol of an “a” wrapped in its own tail.The Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” and the Oxford English

Dictionary explains that the unit was approximately 25 pounds of a solid or about 3 gallons of a liquid. In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba — as a Google image search illustrates. The word “arroba” itself was a Spanish corruption of an older Arabic word.

(src)

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Posted in History, Reviews

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