Slashgeo

Steve's Little World blog discuss, ultimately somewhat, the total cost of ownership of open source geospatial software. Steve later provided clarifications. From the first entry: "GIS users spent A LOT of time learning how to do things the ESRI way - and whether that is the right or wrong way is immaterial. Time AND money is precious and it takes both to switch to new software, especially when it requires new ways of doing things." Spatially Adjusted commented: "I’ll play devils advocate here and say that if someone really wanted to go open source, they could just take their ESRI maintenance costs and apply that to a consultant who could help them deploy open source correctly." Don't miss Paul Ramsey's reaction: "What open source projects want to attract is not users -- it is developers. Developers will make the project stronger, add features, fix bugs, do all the things that end users want, but cannot do for themselves.". Coincidently, the actual poll is about open source geospatial software.

Chris Holmes discuss the future of proprietary vs FOSS (open source) in the Geospatial Web. The entry's conclusion: "In short, proprietary software will continue to exist, it just won’t play the central role. It will be forced to push the edges of innovation even more to stay afloat, but I suspect it will always be a leading edge. Of course I believe open source will innovate as well, especially in this geospatial collaboration area. But the ideal is a hybrid world with the right balance of cooperation and competition to push things forward faster than we could alone."

The Hobu blog has a nice entry about the development process of open source geospatial projects. It reviews all major geospatial open source projects, including ERMapper's ECW, GEOS, GDAL, MapServer and more, with some words on the OSGeo. From the entry's conclusion: "Open source projects, even in the GIS domain, vary widely with respect to their development practices and how open or closed they are. As an open source developer, volunteer, and user, I'm attracted to projects that are openly developed. I will not invest much effort in something where my stake, in effort, is not recognized and respected. Finally, a significant measure of OSGeo's success or non-success in my mind is how good of a job it does at fostering and ensuring open development of its member projects."

Our last poll tells us a majority of visitors uses open source geospatial software, with 37% on a daily basis. About 7% answered they already have what they need and a surprising number of votes, 19%, went to Never! My greatest surprise is no one seems to be waiting for maturity, while maturity is one of the main reason why some open source geospatial software is not main stream. Be sure to read this related story on the total cost of ownership of open source software. The new poll, inspired by briancnorton's comment, asks you who you are!