Slideshow presentation from a recent conference on geospatial technology (which is my field). This particular session was about some of the open source tools that are available. You may not get a whole lot from it, but I think the first handful of slides will be interesting, simply because they present a very clean look at why open source software is becoming very popular in this industry. The main vendor in the field is ESRI, who charges not just license fees, but also license maintenance fees - and additionally milks its clients for consulting fees, training fees, process analysis fees, and all kinds of other charges. With most local governments failing right now due to loss of property tax revenue, getting rid of vendor all those fees is looking better and better.
Anyway, this is what I am interested in:
http://www.terragis.net/docs/workshop/OpenSpourceToolsSpatialAnalysisGeoprocessing.pdf
