Open Thread: Your Thoughts on Open Source Geospatial Software

[BlinkGeo]

Let's get a general discussion going. I personally think that OSS has some great potential, but in the end prefer a hybrid approach that utilizes both commercial and open source software. I'm primarily interested in GeoServer, OpenLayers, and some of the new ESRI stuff, including the ArcGIS Server Javascript API.

[Pietro Blu Giandonato]

I agree with your thoughts Andres.
But in some situations the convergence between OS and commercial sw is almost impossible for several reasons.

I would talk about the panorama here in Italy. I first want to say that these are personal opinions of mine.

In my Country OS has been for long time limited to few people, working almost in Universities. Now the public opinion has pointed its attention to free and open software due to a strong impulse coming from some users communities. By the way, the primary reason is quite awful: OSS is no-cost.

In Italy we have a crowd of geospatial or CAD professionals that just want to save money, so OSS is good. We have public agencies (municipalities, central and regional goverments) with low budgets that will choose OSS just for the same reasons: they are free of charge.

On the other side, there are a lot of people (but not so many) that promote OSS for its philosophy, its huge potential. But often, this people categorically refuses to look to commercial software for the same reason: it's against the FOSS philosophy, so it have to be banned. I'm not a OS developer, but I believe that all geospatial software, both OS or commercial, must converge to some core functions. Both of them could improve the achievement and implementation of these functions only with constant and open confrontation.

I think that fighting a cold war between OS and commercial software is limitating for the development itself of OS. The real potential of open software is its high customization, the flexibility, the modularity, the easy design of specific functions for a customer. This implies high system analysis and modeling capabilities, that must be the background of a good work done with OS.

In conclusion, the situation here in Italy is a substantial egemony of few big dealers of commercial geospatial software opposed to a limited number of single professionals that uses OS. It's just like David against Goliath. We all hope that David, at last, will be the winner, but in this long lasting cold war we all loose the real focus: offering to the customer the BEST technological solution to accomplish its goal. And this really could be an hybrid approach...

But the pure OS guys don't agree to this vision...

[BlinkGeo]

Hey Pietro,

Thanks for the reply and your thoughts on the issue. Good insights, and I think that what you are describing is not isolated to Italy per se. This seems to be an ongoing struggle at a variety of scales and within different sectors of the industry/community. By scales, I mean that the discussion and debate about OS and commercial software can exist within an institution or company (e.g., university or large international company) to a small startup to state governments to countries, etc.

Curious to hear what others have to say about the topic.