[Wolves] Re: comments like buses

[Alex Willmer]

Howard Berry wrote:
> Greetings Luggers,
> Comments from me are a little like the West Midland bus service- nothing
> for ages then two together.
> 1.Have you read about the campaign launched by the Guardian Technology to
> free up data collected by government agencies such as Ordnance Survey
> funded by tax-payers money. In short we pay for it twice and the system of
> these agencies trying to generate cash from sales is a dead hand on
> application development based on mashups and the like. Find out more here:
> http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1731386,00.htm
>   
I have read that article. I agree that by default, public data should be 
made freely available. But I have to disagree that we pay for Ordnance 
Survey data twice. OS aren't funded directly by taxpayer money, they're 
funded by the customers who license or buy the map data. A good chunk of 
that is from government agencies (<50%, from their annual report), so 
taxpayers money does reach them indirectly. The rest should come from 
companies and individuals.

Ed Parsons, the CTO of OS, responded in his blog:
http://www.edparsons.com/?p=192

I'll just say that I wish there was a compromise. A way to release mid 
scale vector mapping under a Free license. Whilst allowing OS to keep 
selling large scale data and so keep funding for it's maintenance. As 
far as I can see, most users wouldn't care about sub-metre accuracy - we 
just want routes and locations.

For the mean time, I'll carry on working with OpenStreetMap:
http://www.openstreetmap.org
> 2. Next comes a request: can anyone recommend a good ftp utility for SuSe
> Linux? I have used the aptly named Bear but it just crashes every time I
> try to up load a file. I think you'll agree that for an ftp program this
> is a bit of a disadvantage!
> On Windows I use FileZilla which is excellent, but as yet there is no
> Linux version
Both KDE and Gnome integrate ftp functionality. So you can use Konqueror 
or Nautilus as a client, just type the url into the address bar (eg 
ftp://someuser@ftp.example.org). To reveal the Nautilus address bar use 
Ctrl+L. Alternatively there's FireFTP, an extension for Firefox which 
I've sometimes used.

Regards

Alex