Hi Miguel,
The answer depends on how you measure success. If your measure of
success is the number of people who drop their proprietary apps in favor
of open source packages then you may not want to build this kind of
bridge since your best tactic may be to play the same vendor lock-in
game as some proprietary vendors do (note I wrote some vendors and not all).
OTOH, if you measure success by the number of happy users/customers of
your software (as I do), then by all means, build as many bridges as
possible. In this case it does not matter if your users continue to use
their proprietary software in parallel with your open source package,
what matters is that at the end of the day they could be more efficient
in doing their work, and in the end become happier campers.
A good example of this is the GDAL/OGR project which is a success (IMHO)
in large part because the license and philosophy of the project
encouraged proprietary vendors to use and contribute to it. As a result,
it is in use everywhere today, and even ESRI considers it part of "the
best open source technology" that "it is committed to supporting"
(http://esri.com/opensource). See http://gdal.org/credits.html for a
list of organizations who have adopted and supported the project over
the years.
My 0.02$
Daniel
Miguel Montesinos wrote:
Hello,
I throw out a question some people are debating in Spain [1 (only
Spanish)]. Sextante has the intention (or at least have thought about
it) of building bindings so that it can be used from proprietary
applications, like ArcGIS.
1) Do you think that it may avoid proprietary users to migrate to open
solutions, as they can benefit of open-source libraries under their
proprietary software? Besides, this give arguments to proprietary
manufacturers because of the weakness of open-source software needing to
run on top of proprietary ones, or to sell out their compatibility with
FOSS4G.
2) Do you think that it may lead proprietary users to try out and
migrate to open source solutions due to the good impression they can
have after using FOSS4G? Besides, this could generate incomes to improve
FOSS4G developments, and offer alternatives to proprietary extensions,
drivers, ...
What is your oppinion about this tricky question?
Best,
[1] http://sextantegis.blogspot.com/
---------------------------------------------
Miguel Montesinos
CTO
PRODEVELOP, S.L.
mmontesinos [at] prodevelop [dot] es
www.prodevelop.es
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Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
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