adim_web

Ron, both of you are famous in free software and amateur radio communities due to your work, so thanks again.

I have some doubts though regarding the safety of manned launches here. Seems like a serious issue to me and I hope it's not treated lightly.

I used QGIS to extract data from Corine/CLC2006 for custom Flightgear scenery some time ago. A very intuitive and powerful piece of software. I think it's more popular in universities than in commercial space. Thanks to the author for the effort to make GIS easy for us GNU/Linux users.

It's not really that simple. Writing free software is not zero sum (you either make money or you don't). The process of writing software is also a process where you learn things (which can be rewarding in itself, and learning from other free software is easier) that you can later apply even in your daily job. It's important not to treat free software like a money making machine. Providing value is more important than extracting money. For example Google uses a lot of open source software created by third parties and they make money, but they also provide a lot of services for free. As long as it remains a fair deal, it's not that important that a corporation extracts value from software created by others (as the money may go to people who maintain, test and provide patches). Remember that if you create some piece of free software that a corporation can use, so can somebody who doesn't have the money to buy a license, and that person may be a future developer who's going to write software for you.