Open Source vs Commercial??

Wednesday, 15 July, 2009

It’s hardly a “new” story, but the whole issue of open source cropped up recently. I’m currently lead editor for a book on geomorphological mapping which will incorporate a DVD. We want to make best use of this and include as much imagery, data, software etc as is appropriate. I need to clarify the T&Cs of some “free” products as whilst some are free (as in beer), they are not necessarily free (as in freedom of speech) to do with as you wish.

Many products use GNU licensing which makes things much simpler: don’t sell the software (other than distribution costs) and if you modify it, that code needs to be made available.

Which of course brought us back to the issue of commercial software and this priceless quote which came my way:

“Seems like ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS (huge, bad, expensive, wrong, awkward, etc).”

Now commercial is not necessarily bad and Ryan Strynatka (ERDAS) gave a nice comment:

As for software: cost is always relative. In the commercial world the ROI for photogrammetry software is quite high, otherwise you wouldn’t see so many successful commercial mapping firms.

Clearly organisations believe they are getting good ROI from ArcGIS. The more generic GIS arena is somewhat different to the highly specialized photogrammetric one. And there are some credible open source alternatives starting to make in roads in much the same way the Open Office has. MapServer, Open Layers, UDig, QGIS and MapWindow are all proving popular. Of course I’d be the first to say that ArcGIS is as close to the “single stop shop” as you can get, but there is plenty that could be considerably better. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it is government that drives this area forward on the basis of open specification (ISO) file formats. And Google understands the importance of “place” so that, in the same way it is going after Microsoft, expect there to be in roads on the geospatial front. Competition is good for the user!

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