In a recent poll on slashgeo, briancnorton stated (in part):
The reality of the situation is that source being open or closed is totally irrelevant to your average geospatial professional.
I commented on this poll, but I would like to develop my thoughts a bit further. While many geospatial professionals work for organisations that can afford proprietary software, and are quite capable of doing their jobs without open source geospatial software, I would argue that open source is anything but irrelevant to these users. There are at least two factors that are affecting them.
First, we have the efficiency cost. I’m not saying that proprietary software is inefficient in performing the tasks it is created for, but that it creates an overall reduction in organisational efficiency. No one product is the best at every task. By locking-in with one vendor you are either giving up the opportunity to use the right tool for the job, or accepting the additional costs of internal data translations or complicated workarounds. In order to get the most out of your investment in proprietary software you will often find yourself using a shovel to drive a nail, or deciding that you really wanted to dig a hole in the first place.
Next, we have the social cost. Knowledge is power, and when spatial knowledge can only be accessed through high-cost applications and data, disenfranchised groups within our society are pushed further out of the way. Also, people without access to proprietary tools are prevented from contributing to the common good through the unique insights they may have otherwise presented. In any case, society as a whole is suffering because knowledge is not freely discernable by all citizens.
As briancnorton said:
Until you get the working level people motivated and pushing for it, you’ve got nothing.
As geospatial professionals, we have a responsibility to ensure that the software we are using is not costing our organisations more than the initial purchase price in lost efficiency. We also have a responsibility to ensure that our society does not suffer due to a lack of knowledge. Getting involved in the open source geospatial foundation (OSGeo) and its related projects is one way of helping to ensure that these responsibilities are met.
