Hi Steve,
Thank you for raising this important discussion.
In some European countries the situation is a bit different and Open
Source solutions are gaining an increasing market share. I live and work
in Switzerland - and while the majority of the markets still uses ESRI
products - there is an increasing number of provinces who also
increasingly use Postgis, QGIS, OpenLayers, etc - sometimes exclusively
and sometimes side by side with proprietary software.
I also think that the next couple of years we will see an increasing
number of governmental organisations introducing OpenSource GIS side by
side with commercial GIS and will gradually shift more and more
applications to FOSSGIS.
Some examples in Switzerland:
* The national mapping portal runs exclusively on OS software (Postgis,
OpenLayers, and some more) - it runs very well, fast and is very popular
- production of the data is still done exclusively in ESRI
* 2 provinces in Switzerland run exclusively in FOSSGIS, about 7 and 8
additional provinces introduced FOSSGIS side by side with commercial
products
* several cities and water/gaz providers are currently migrating to
FOSSGIS to document utility networks
* The austrian province "Vorarlberg" introduced several hundred
installations of QGIS as the main GIS in their administration
* several Scandinavian countries/provinces/cities are already using
FOSSGIS on both Desktop GIS and web mapping
The list would be much longer - but things are moving slowly and
steadily to more FOSSGIS usage in Europe - at least I can tell
There are two other interesting points:
* in my opinion - it is not so much about money - but about different
values: the ability to more easily influence the direction of the
software, support of open standards, integration with other FOSS
software, etc.
* as an employee of a local government it is so much more interesting
being able to actively contribute to FOSS software rather than just
using software "as is".
As you can see above - it is more the "richer" countries that are moving
towards Open Source and fewer "poorer" countries. This indicates that
the factor "cost" is less important than people think.
Andreas
On 11.06.2015 22:28, Steve G wrote:
I am not sure this is the correct forum for a start to this discussion, but
I've been pondering this for a while and interested what others think. I
work for local government in the U.S. and when people generally talk about
GIS there is no doubt an automatic association with the ESRI ArcGIS
platform. And beyond GIS itself, the dominance that ESRI has is even more
pronounced given the fact that many cities have implemented other related
systems (permitting, computer aided dispatch, etc) that are identified
business partners with ESRI. Furthermore, the "GIS Local Government" track
that ESRI developed has evolved to offer an "turnkey" approach for local
government self-service to establish a robust geodatabase (Local Government
Information Model), maps, apps, web services, etc. This extends a COTS
approach for local governments to establish, develop, and maintain a fairly
complete GIS. In my opinion, pure genius...because for a lot of small
cities/governments with limited staff and budget, the turnkey approach is
very appealing. For city bureaucrats thinking about implementing/extending
GIS, what they might think as little $$$ and you get all of this?
Awesome...here's my money.
HOWEVER, this approach has its drawbacks. Long-term license/use costs,
vendor lock-in, continuous waiting for someone at the company to fix
something....well, the list goes on (just read any blog post supporting open
source/FOSS).
So, with the evolution of QGIS as a prevailing replacement/alternative for
the other product, is anyone thinking about building more of a turnkey
approach (database, maps, apps, web services, etc) geared to local
governments? I like the direction of the OpenGeo platform (and others)
trying to provide the whole software stack, but still if a small local
government wants to have a full fledged interactive GIS, it might seem like
a lot of work to develop and maintain.
I am interested in other thoughts...perhaps this belongs on a blog post
somewhere more independent, but perhaps this can be a place to begin.
Steve G.
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