In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Ok, I'm almost back behind the helm and I expect it's going to take me at least a week to catch up the geonews, but you'll get them.

During my absence last week, Slashdot ran a discussion named Ask Slashdot: Open Source vs Proprietary GIS Solution?

Their summary: "As the Project Manager for a non-profit looking to implement a tech project, I am running into a few dilemmas, and as a casual Slashdotter I could really use some help. I'll start with a brief explanation of the project. We research issues in Canadian Immigrants, and found that there was a lack of recent, unaggregated information. As we dug further, we found that some data was available, but there was no central repository. Therefore, we are building a web based service to collect this data, with the intent of having it display in Google Maps and then be downloadable as a CSV file that is readable in GIS software such as ESRI Arcsoft, so that data may be visualized."

Like a lot of Slashdot discussions, the value is in the moderated comments.