Value proposition for open source geospatial

Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 2:20 pm Posted in Advocacy, Open Source

For geospatial consultants, the business case for open source is easy. Your clients have fixed budgets; with open source software you get a larger portion of their budgets for customisation, and they get software that is better-tailored to their business needs and has lower ongoing costs because of a lack of “maintenance” fees. These benefits are covered very well in an article by Dirk Riehle. All you have to do is sell them to your customers.

The case has not been quite as clearly documented for proprietary geospatial software development. Autodesk has talked about the value of open-source for MapGuide, but beyond that there has not been much discussion. Within the last week two articles have been published which connect the dots very well. First, Dale Lutz posted on Safe Software’s use of open source geospatial components, with some interesting follow-on commentary by Paul Ramsey on how this works even though the open source components that Safe is using are “competing” with FME. Second, the OSGeo Journal v2 includes a very clear article by Matthew Fleagle and Michael P Gerlek on how LizardTech benefits (pdf - 171KB) from both the use of and contributions towards open source geospatial projects. This is a highly-recommended read… as is the entire journal.

It is clear that there is value in open source geospatial even for proprietary companies, and those who realize this first will gain an advantage over their slower-moving competitors. I would be interested in hearing how other proprietary companies are using open source geospatial to provide greater value to their customers and to allow greater focus on their core competencies.

-J

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  1. 1Sean Gillies on Sep 21, 2007 at 3:48 pm:

    In a way, GDAL and FME are sorta like Ruby on Rails and Basecamp: the open source framework and the derived commercial application. Except that Safe is still in the 20th century business model of selling software, and so they’ve got to keep a huge amount of it proprietary. 37signals, on the other hand, is selling *services* and benefits from open sourcing much more of their software.