Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [postgis-users] A bit off topic, but FOSS GIS clients...
Le Thursday 03 January 2008 02:27:56 Dr. Markus Lupp, vous avez écrit : Paul Ramsey schrieb: Also, wasn't there a FOSS4G presentation about consulting as a way to further FOSS GIS development and make a living at it as well? Bit of a myth, as far as I can tell. This open source technology wedge is still so small that the business opportunities remain relatively tiny, particularly in North America, where the technology base is so homogenous and the mental lock-in to a vendor-led mentality so strong. Not a myth in Europe (or to be more precise, at least in Germany). There is a number of (growing) companies that have FOSS GIS consulting business models and do pretty well. Regards, Markus I agree with Markus, this is same in France, and a lot of people/companies are looking for OpenSource Products :) Have an happy new year, Y. -- Yves Jacolin --- http://softlibre.gloobe.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: [postgis-users] A bit off topic, but FOSSGIS clients...
Markus Lupp said: Paul Ramsey schrieb: Also, wasn't there a FOSS4G presentation about consulting as a way to further FOSS GIS development and make a living at it as well? Bit of a myth, as far as I can tell. This open source technology wedge is still so small that the business opportunities remain relatively tiny, particularly in North America, where the technology base is so homogenous and the mental lock-in to a vendor-led mentality so strong. Not a myth in Europe (or to be more precise, at least in Germany). There is a number of (growing) companies that have FOSS GIS consulting business models and do pretty well. I would say that in other european countries, FOSSGIS don't have so much presence as it happens in Germany. In Spain, there are a good number of companies making money out of FOSSGIS (maybe less than in Germany), but it's not the same (I think) in other countries like UK, Italy,.. Am I wrong? Paul Ramsey said: Everyone should drop their projects and work on uDig. But all the gvSIG developers are supported by funding from Spanish government that requires all the work be GPL; and they also prefer a pure Java implementation to the SWT/Eclipse implementation that uDig uses. And the OpenJUMP people have an existing rich set of editing tools that are not easily portable to the uDig application model. Are they going to throw away all their existing functionality to move to another platform? Why? OpenJUMP works fine for them. I agree Paul. Diversity is richness. Every community may have its place under the sun. Otherwise, it's true that is a pity not sharing more resources on common tasks. Regarding gvSIG, GPL is a *must* for the project. Other things about technology (like Swing vs.SWT) are just decissions made in a moment under some constraints, and as all technical decissions, must be open to change if necessary. Regarding merges, I prefer some approaches like the case of openLayers and other WebMapping projects. I think that pure merges do not exist, it's usually a project taking over another one, or a project moving to a new one. And just a quote. 70% of gvSIG funding come from European Union, and they do not require a special license, it's a decission of the PSC. Oh, and I agree Andrea, fun is the only way to produce good software, and specially good open-source softwre. Regards, - Miguel Montesinos Technical Manager PRODEVELOP C/ Conde Salvatierra, 34 - 10 46004 Valencia. Spain e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.prodevelop.es https://www.prodevelop.es/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.prodevelop.es Tlf: +34 963510612 ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss winmail.dat___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Hi all, I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking about Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen]. I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products from big software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world? Best regards, Ivan Gilberto Camara wrote: Dear OSGEO Discussion List members: Paul Ramsey´s remarks are right on target. First, GIS is a large arena and there are different motivations for developers, that prevent them from joining a single project such as uDIG. Second, it is very difficult for a private company to develop a world-class FOSS4G product and survive based only on consulting fees for the commercial sector. Third, to overcome these limitations there is a need for governmental intervention, which may be direct, as in the case of Catalonian government´s support for gvSIG, or indirect, as in the decision of Germany to support open source software. In Brazil, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been supporting local GIS development for 25 years, with a lot of success in our national user community. Without official support, there would be no local FOOS4G development in Brazil. In 2003, I did a F00S4G market survey and published the results as a chapter of a US National Academy of Sciences book: Open Source GIS Software: Myths and Realities www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/camara_open_source_myths.pdf. We analysed 70 FOSS4G software projects taken from the FreeGIS list, and divided them into three categories: networked products (e.g. GRASS), corporate products (e.g., PostGIS) and individual products (e.g., CAVOR). From each product, we assessed its maturity, level of support and functionality. Our main conclusions at the time were: (a) Only 6% of the products were developed by networked teams. Thus, the “Linux paradigm” is the exception rather than the rule. (b) Corporations (private or public) are the main developers of successful open source products. Corporations account for 41% of all products. (e) Individual-led software (a small team of 1-3 people) have less quality and more mortality than the above. These results show that the impetus behind successful open source software was not coming from altruistic individuals working in the midnight hour, but from professional programmers. I consider that a similar result would be obtained today, should the assessment be repeated. This analysis was further elaborated in a JASIST paper: Information Policies and Open Source Software in Developing Countries www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/camara_fonseca_jasist.pdf. For the FOSS4G effort to be fruitful and sustainable, we need a very informed and candid assessment of our business model. My personal view, based on 25 years of experience, is that government intervention is essential for the open source model to survive beyond a handful of examples. Best regards Gilberto ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:26:51AM -0500, Lucena, Ivan wrote: Hi all, I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking about Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen]. I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products from big software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world? Depending on what you're reading (I can't tell from a quick Google which types of stories you're talking about), I'm not sure how Xen really plays a part in the commercialization. Xen can be used to host products in a virtual environment, and if that is the case, there's no money being made off *Xen*, money is being made off the other software. I could be wrong. I just didn't find anything to back up either way in the Wikipedia and related links. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Xen is one of those things where the market is SO DAMN HUGE that even the very SMALL proportion of money that an open source company can wring from the marketplace is actually non-trivial in an absolute sense. If Red Hat is only monetizing 0.01% of the Linux marketplace, that's still fine, because they are making millions. The best market places seem to be enterprise software with large new markets. Examples of success stories are JBoss, Red Hat, Sleepycat, MySQL, and note that the last two are actually sort of open source companies, in that they still fall back on the software-for-sale model for revenues. The trouble with the geospatial marketplace is that it is relatively small, so the small proportion an open source company can monetize is smaller still. The problem with service-oriented FOSS businesses is that they don't make money from software, so the easiest thing to cut in budgeting is core software development. Let the product languish for a while, it doesn't cost you anything as long as service business keeps flowing in. Or, in the case of pure consultancies, don't do any core development at all, just use the software. The service- oriented FOSS business I think has serious structural problems, not around providing good service, but around strong incentives to nourish the underlying software. P. On 3-Jan-08, at 8:58 AM, Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:26:51AM -0500, Lucena, Ivan wrote: Hi all, I am *not* going to disagree with Andrea, Gilberto, Paul, Howard or anybody else. I just want to point out a interesting open source business model that is making a big impact this days. I am talking about Xen [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen]. I keep reading news and more news about new commercial products from big software companies based on Xen. Is that possible on the GIS world? Depending on what you're reading (I can't tell from a quick Google which types of stories you're talking about), I'm not sure how Xen really plays a part in the commercialization. Xen can be used to host products in a virtual environment, and if that is the case, there's no money being made off *Xen*, money is being made off the other software. I could be wrong. I just didn't find anything to back up either way in the Wikipedia and related links. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
[OSGeo-Discuss] summary of VGI workshop in Santa Barbara Dec 13-14, 2007
Greetings, I posted my brief summary of the recently held VGI workshop on the geowanking list, and am reposting it here as well. I hope you find this useful -- Workshop on Volunteered Geographic Information Dec 13-14, 2007 Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara, CA Approximately 30 participants. The participant list and contributed issues papers are available at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/participants.html Presentations ranged from smart sensors for solving global problems (think cell phones that transmit geocoded ambient information, digital traces that we leave everywhere we go such a while swiping a subway card, crossing a traffic light, working at a wifi hotspot, or talking on the cellphone [1] to GPS units that can be extended with low-cost measurement devices: for example, GPS that not only records water locations, but also measures water quality [2]) to VGI from the grassroots where citizens contribute and fill in the gaps that the government can't or won't [3]. OpenStreetMap was presented as a specific case of organized VGI [4] to personalized driving routes [5] VGI implies connectivity. Waldseemüller map was shown as one of the first documented examples of VGI. In today's world, while a formal naming process for placenames exists, technology makes it possible to have multiple names for a single location. VGI itself is described by many different terms: user-generated content/collective intellegence/crowdsourcing/asserted information. Whatever it is called, it leads to empowerment of millions who are untrained and have no authority otherwise. VGI leads to non-uniform coverage as only interesting places tend to get covered, and depends on web search engines to allow us to find it. There are three types of sensors: inert or fixed; carried on moving objects; and human beings. A key trait of VGI is that humans act as sensors. This is really citizen science in action, and some of its examples are the Christmas bird count and Project GLOBE. Some possible research questions to consider are: Why do people do this? Is it self-promotion (exhibitionism, retaining ownership of contributed data); altruism; a desire to fill gaps in the available data; or sharing with friends? Studying the range of authority and assertion, the potential for subversion of information, and the review process which may or may not be localized [6]. Almost 80% of all decisions are based on spatial information. Like in any decision-making, information loops exist in geographic information based decision-making as well. Characterizing VGI quality: completeness, consistency. Notions of place, discovering VGI, integrating VGI and GI, grounding semantics, modeling trust and reputation, liability. Metaphors for web interaction, incentives, social semiosis with VGI. Scaling the loops: from geeks to everybody, from GPS tracks and images to rich data and services, from disconnected loops to interfaced loops, from a few big social networks to many small ones [7]. There is room for both VGI and authoritative GI, for different purposes as well as to validate the former against the latter. One way to think about it is that VGI is action driven while GI is process driven. VGI is basically observational assertions and metadata about such assertions are very important [8]. I offered Amazon's Real Name feature as an example of metadata about assertors. ESRI also demonstrated their distributed GIS platform that allows loosely coupled authors and users, mashups, and use of standard APIs with ArcGIS as a system for authoring, serving and using VGI/AGI. ArcGIS server has a crawl-able, KML-tagged Services Explorer [9] Jack summarized with his observations on the entire workshop. He commented on GIS and VGI relationship — how can GIS users use VGI data? How does GIS support VGI? Does VGI have the promise of SDI? How can we mine VGI data for experts use? VGI benefits greatly from GIS concepts — spatial referencing system, visualization and query tools, web servers and services, shared data bases. What would GIS professionals say about VGI? Well, a good basemap is important, data models are important, standard workflows to create, maintain, edit and manage data are important, good geographic data requires a lot of work, spatial analysis modeling requires consistent data models, VGI observation data and assertions are valuable but how do we organize and integrate? (Spatial data mining, ETL) Six types of geographic knowledge: geog data, data models, geoprocessing models, geospatial workflows, metadata, maps and visualization. Distinction between amateur and professional systems: LA street lights, NESA street lights (Denmark, allows neighbors to dim their street lights), DHS security, NYC 311, BLM surveys, WWF Forest Watch. Google asserted that we are sitting on the long tail of geographic data (breadth: how many places we know; depth: how much do we know about each of those places). Google has counted seven million My Maps instances, 300 million
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Gilberto Camara wrote: For the FOSS4G effort to be fruitful and sustainable, we need a very informed and candid assessment of our business model. My personal view, based on 25 years of experience, is that government intervention is essential for the open source model to survive beyond a handful of examples. Gilberto, It is my personal opinion that sustainable success in the FOSSGIS arena does and will depend on sustaining support from the user community. In practice, government directly and indirectly represents a huge user community, and one with the capacity and organization to provide meaningful support for FOSSGIS development. When I speak of organization, I mean that government's can provide aggregate support based on a recognision of the broad benefits of investment rather than needing to justify all expenditures on a strict cost/benefit basis for individual projects. What is less clear to me is how we as a community can help governments put resources to work in a most constructive way. I think INPE has done great things, as have the gvSIG team. But, I am left with the impression that the same model applied widely by many national or state governments would result in a lot of duplication. I'd like to explore models where governments at different levels cooperate and contribute to joint development. In fact, perhaps the gvSIG model, with some (much?) of the support now coming from the EU level, and increased efforts to promote it's broad use is a good model for this. The other approach which has worked, in at least a trickle down way, is governments showing a preference for foss solutions where practical, and the consulting and integration companies that provide them based on existing project turning some of the contract funding into improvements back to the core projects. This model has been responsible for quite a bit of the work on and around MapServer for instance. Perhaps due to the relentless propaganda of the anti government right in North America, I have some concerns about governments throwing large amounts of money into FOSS development without clear thinking about how to make that money work efficiently. It is easy to imagine boondoggles that could suck up lots of money with little in the way of useful products. Best regards, -- ---+-- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush| President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org ___ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Paul wrote: The trouble with the geospatial marketplace is that it is relatively small, so the small proportion an open source company can monetize is smaller still. I wonder how this will change as the ability to obtain spatial information improves and becomes more affordable? A few decades ago you needed 3 or 4 men, expensive optical equipment, and a trained eye to produce maps. Now all you need is a teenager, a motorcycle, and a GPS receiver. I think you will find more opportunities for companies with a business model built around FOSS as this trend plays out. Here are a couple of examples from my own personal experience: On entry barrier to GIS is initial data production costs. I have been impressed at the difference the availability of USDA Aerial Photography has made in the last few years. (The USDA provides 1 meter color orthophotgraphy to most counties in California and other parts of the United States on a yearly basis. This data can be accessed for free or next-to-nothing.) This has allowed us to do things in my own office that we couldn't have considered before. The cost of that type of imagery on that large of a scale was just too prohibitive. As geospatial data becomes cheaper, more up-to-date, and more precise, I believe you will see the entry-level cost of GIS implementation at different organizations drop. This is especially true of remotely sensed data. Still, it applies to vector data as well. You can't find very many California counties that don't have vector data available, although licensing is still an issue in some places. I believe there are a lot of markets for GIS that haven't been cracked open yet. Land surveying is one of these. ESRI has thrown some darts in this direction, but if you ask your typical land surveyor what GIS is you would probably get some off-the-wall answers. I doubt even 5% would understand how they could use GIS technology to improve the efficiency of there own operations. Another example is an experience I had recently when I volunteered for a local Ranger District of the US Forest Service. I assumed the Ranger District would have a GIS person on staff, or at least have some GIS software and have people that could use it. This was not the case. Most of the Forest Service staff at the Ranger Station didn't know what GIS was, and they certainly weren't using it at a local level for forest management. Thinking about this makes me wish I had about a couple million dollars in capital to spend. :] I still think there is great potential for a company to educate potential clients on the benefits of GIS to their particular organization, after which the company could then make an honest profit assisting with the organization with a low cost FOSS GIS implementations. It's too bad I have so much fun as a land surveyor, or I'd have to put more time into getting this type of business off the ground. With the US housing market in the toilet you never know what might happen... :] There will be lots of opportunities for FOSS GIS in the future. (It almost makes me want to buy stock in Refractions Research.) :] I think the key will be making more of an effort to find customers, instead of waiting for them to find us. I'm not talking about existing ESRI users, but rather people that have had little exposure to GIS to begin with, but who could easily be GIS users if someone showed them how. Landon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Paul Ramsey Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 9:09 AM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models Xen is one of those things where the market is SO DAMN HUGE that even the very SMALL proportion of money that an open source company can wring from the marketplace is actually non-trivial in an absolute sense. If Red Hat is only monetizing 0.01% of the Linux marketplace, that's still fine, because they are making millions. The best market places seem to be enterprise software with large new markets. Examples of success stories are JBoss, Red Hat, Sleepycat, MySQL, and note that the last two are actually sort of open source companies, in that they still fall back on the software-for-sale model for revenues. The trouble with the geospatial marketplace is that it is relatively small, so the small proportion an open source company can monetize is smaller still. The problem with service-oriented FOSS businesses is that they don't make money from software, so the easiest thing to cut in budgeting is core software development. Let the product languish for a while, it doesn't cost you anything as long as service business keeps flowing in. Or, in the case of pure consultancies, don't do any core development at all, just use the software. The service- oriented FOSS business I think has serious structural problems, not around providing good service, but around strong incentives to nourish the underlying software.
Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Gilberto and all, I would like to give some comments on this from the perspective of a GIS company with an Open Source business model, I hope you will find them of interest. lat/lon was founded in the year 2000 as a private company (in Germany) and had from its beginning an open source business model. We do consulting and software development for GIS projects, mainly in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Most of the project solutions we develop are based on deegree, a library tailored for interoperable SDIs that was originally developed together with Bonn University. We compete with other vendors, proprietary and open source based alike, on the same grounds (software quality, price, quality of support and so on). With each project we do, we develop deegree a step further, we have no source of funding that does not come out of projects we have to apply for first. I do not want to go into too much detail, but we do pretty good, which means we can pay our bills and have continuous growth year by year. Also there is a number of other companies by now that are developing solutions based on deegree, some of these companies are based in neighbouring countries. Now to the question of government intervention. After reading Gilberto's mail I asked myself what is meant by this term? In Germany (where lat/lon so far is mainly active) there is no official policy supporting open source software. There is a number of guidelines that suggest so, but all public bodies are free to do how they like. But there is a growing support from people in governmental agencies who decided by themselves that they want to use more open source software (Gilberto - is this what you mean by indirect support?). Still - as I said - there is not any kind of protectionism for Free Software. We (and other companies doing the same job) have to convience our clients that what we offer is good value for money. So from my point of view it is possible to compete in the GIS market using an open source business model without any high-level government intervention (although it surely helps). Perhaps Germany is special in this regard, but I doubt so - we are getting more and more projects in neighbouring countries as well. I guess that there are other companies having similar experiences. I have to say that I am a bit surprised that I got the impression (from the remarks by Paul and others) that the same is not possible in Northern America!? Best regards, Markus Gilberto Camara schrieb: Dear OSGEO Discussion List members: Paul Ramsey´s remarks are right on target. First, GIS is a large arena and there are different motivations for developers, that prevent them from joining a single project such as uDIG. Second, it is very difficult for a private company to develop a world-class FOSS4G product and survive based only on consulting fees for the commercial sector. Third, to overcome these limitations there is a need for governmental intervention, which may be direct, as in the case of Catalonian government´s support for gvSIG, or indirect, as in the decision of Germany to support open source software. In Brazil, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been supporting local GIS development for 25 years, with a lot of success in our national user community. Without official support, there would be no local FOOS4G development in Brazil. In 2003, I did a F00S4G market survey and published the results as a chapter of a US National Academy of Sciences book: Open Source GIS Software: Myths and Realities www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/camara_open_source_myths.pdf. We analysed 70 FOSS4G software projects taken from the FreeGIS list, and divided them into three categories: networked products (e.g. GRASS), corporate products (e.g., PostGIS) and individual products (e.g., CAVOR). From each product, we assessed its maturity, level of support and functionality. Our main conclusions at the time were: (a) Only 6% of the products were developed by networked teams. Thus, the “Linux paradigm” is the exception rather than the rule. (b) Corporations (private or public) are the main developers of successful open source products. Corporations account for 41% of all products. (e) Individual-led software (a small team of 1-3 people) have less quality and more mortality than the above. These results show that the impetus behind successful open source software was not coming from altruistic individuals working in the midnight hour, but from professional programmers. I consider that a similar result would be obtained today, should the assessment be repeated. This analysis was further elaborated in a JASIST paper: Information Policies and Open Source Software in Developing Countries www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/camara_fonseca_jasist.pdf. For the FOSS4G effort to be fruitful and sustainable, we need a very informed and candid assessment of our business model. My personal view,
RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models
Markus wrote: I have to say that I am a bit surprised that I got the impression (from the remarks by Paul and others) that the same is not possible in Northern America!? I'm no expert, but I think most people involved in FOSS development in America would agree that the political climate for FOSS in this nation can be very hostile. Microsoft is a very powerful lobby, and ESRI is fairly entrenched in the government world. (This may not be the case in some universities and far flung government offices, but it is definitely the rule.) From my own experience with other developers from OpenJUMP, which are mostly outside of the United States, support of FOSS by European governments is much stronger than here in America. I find this somewhat ironic, since it seems our publicly funded geospatial data is much more accessible than in Europe. Landon -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dr. Markus Lupp Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 4:03 PM To: OSGeo Discussions Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Re: FOSS4GIS business models Gilberto and all, I would like to give some comments on this from the perspective of a GIS company with an Open Source business model, I hope you will find them of interest. lat/lon was founded in the year 2000 as a private company (in Germany) and had from its beginning an open source business model. We do consulting and software development for GIS projects, mainly in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Most of the project solutions we develop are based on deegree, a library tailored for interoperable SDIs that was originally developed together with Bonn University. We compete with other vendors, proprietary and open source based alike, on the same grounds (software quality, price, quality of support and so on). With each project we do, we develop deegree a step further, we have no source of funding that does not come out of projects we have to apply for first. I do not want to go into too much detail, but we do pretty good, which means we can pay our bills and have continuous growth year by year. Also there is a number of other companies by now that are developing solutions based on deegree, some of these companies are based in neighbouring countries. Now to the question of government intervention. After reading Gilberto's mail I asked myself what is meant by this term? In Germany (where lat/lon so far is mainly active) there is no official policy supporting open source software. There is a number of guidelines that suggest so, but all public bodies are free to do how they like. But there is a growing support from people in governmental agencies who decided by themselves that they want to use more open source software (Gilberto - is this what you mean by indirect support?). Still - as I said - there is not any kind of protectionism for Free Software. We (and other companies doing the same job) have to convience our clients that what we offer is good value for money. So from my point of view it is possible to compete in the GIS market using an open source business model without any high-level government intervention (although it surely helps). Perhaps Germany is special in this regard, but I doubt so - we are getting more and more projects in neighbouring countries as well. I guess that there are other companies having similar experiences. I have to say that I am a bit surprised that I got the impression (from the remarks by Paul and others) that the same is not possible in Northern America!? Best regards, Markus Gilberto Camara schrieb: Dear OSGEO Discussion List members: Paul Ramsey´s remarks are right on target. First, GIS is a large arena and there are different motivations for developers, that prevent them from joining a single project such as uDIG. Second, it is very difficult for a private company to develop a world-class FOSS4G product and survive based only on consulting fees for the commercial sector. Third, to overcome these limitations there is a need for governmental intervention, which may be direct, as in the case of Catalonian government´s support for gvSIG, or indirect, as in the decision of Germany to support open source software. In Brazil, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has been supporting local GIS development for 25 years, with a lot of success in our national user community. Without official support, there would be no local FOOS4G development in Brazil. In 2003, I did a F00S4G market survey and published the results as a chapter of a US National Academy of Sciences book: Open Source GIS Software: Myths and Realities www.dpi.inpe.br/gilberto/papers/camara_open_source_myths.pdf. We analysed 70 FOSS4G software projects taken from the FreeGIS list, and divided them into three categories: networked products (e.g. GRASS), corporate products (e.g., PostGIS) and individual products (e.g., CAVOR). From each
