The Grey Lady gets her PostGIS on

The tech team at the New York Times has rolled out a geo-enabled application called “Represent “, and under the covers is a regular murderer’s row of open source technology. PostGIS, GeoDjango, GEOS, GDAL, and on an on.

What’s wrong with these guys, why aren’t they deploying using the market leading proprietary tools? My guess is, they just don’t know any better.

The real action these days is web application development, and the action there is in frameworks like Rails, Django, Drupal, Plone, and the like. What tools integrate better with those environments? What tools are developers using those environments likely to find and try on their own? Open source blooms in green fields. Looking at ESRI-dependent government agencies and wondering “where is the open source?” is like looking at the Bronx and wondering “where are all the flowers? “

From All Points Blog