I'm loving Iván's posts this morning. I need to buy him a beer next chance I get...
Esri has always been supportive of Open Source and Open Data, especially when compared to Microsoft (which is generally hostile to Open Source). Of course, supportive doesn't mean they buy into Open Source completely. I doubt you'll ever see the source code to ArcGIS Desktop in GitHub. However, there are many bits of source code in GitHub that ArcGIS depends on: GDAL/OGR, proj.4, Python immediately come to mind. It used to be that if you scanned through the files in an ArcGIS installation, you'd see at least three different version of GDAL.DLL. What that meant was that at least three different divisions within Esri depended on GDAL or OGR so much that they couldn't even unify on a single version of the library. Esri depends on Open Source almost to the same degree as Google! One noticeable difference between Esri and Google is that Esri's corporate culture prevents them from attracting and hiring leading Open Source developers. Where do Frank Warmerdam and Guido van Rossum work? Interestingly, where Esri puts forward their best effort is education. If you are at an American University, you probably have access to an Esri site license. That site license typically costs the university about what a commercial enterprise pays for two desktop licenses for ArcGIS. It's less than one years' tuition for one student at many schools. For all intents and purposes, Esri software is free for academics. Esri also spends a lot of money on producing decent educational materials. Esri press resurrected the English version of Bertin's _Semiology of Graphics_. If you need to teach a GIS class at any level, Esri's going to make sure you get lots of help. And just as Google does a good job of attracting some of the best Open Source developers, Esri attracts some of the best GIS Educators: Aileen Buckley, David DiBiase, Dawn Wright, Mike Gould, Joe Kierski, etc. In the 90s we saw an all-out-war between Microsoft and Open Source. In the 2000s, we saw companies that adopted the collaborative possibilities of open source (and the Internet) surpass the Microsoft juggernaut. Does this mean this decade will see pure Open Source companies rise? At this point, it almost seems to be going the other way. Apple came from the dredges in the 90s to become the most valuable company in the world - coming close the the combined market valuation of Microsoft, Google and Esri combined. How open is Apple? -Eric -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=- Eric B. Wolf 720-334-7734 On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 9:08 AM, Iván Sánchez Ortega <[email protected]>wrote: > On Lunes, 9 de abril de 2012 15:04:57 Stefan Keller escribió: > > I did not understand: Are they changing their business model? Do they > > abandon obvious vendor lock-in issues? > > IMHO, ESRI is trying to cover every possible ground. They want to appeal to > both open- and closed-source devs so, no matter who wins in the end, > they're > still in business. > > I saw this very clearly with OSM data support on their part. They want to > have > the best software for managing OSM data, *and* the best sw to manage navteq > data, *and* the best sw for managing their own data, *and* the best sw to > manage official NMA data. So no matter which dataset "wins", you will want > to > use their products. > > By covering every possible ground, they make sure they cover the winning > ground. At least that's what I think their strategy is. > > > > Best, > -- > ---------------------------------- > Iván Sánchez Ortega <[email protected]> <[email protected]> > > Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable. > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >
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