[Freegis-list] Re: GIS grant to help map cities worldwide

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Mon, Feb 10, 2003 at 06:35:07PM +0100, Jeff Thurston wrote:
> When you say "You get the same gurantees as for proprietary products
> (software is always just technology), but usually a far better service
> (because you are not bound to a
> specific vendor, the contracted service company does the best possible
> service for you to keep you as a client)." I would like to point out that
> many companies and individuals provide excellent service for proprietary
> products - if not, they are not in business long and without a doubt they
> seek to retain clients.

there are companies offering service for proprietary products.
But they themselves are limited to the abilities of the product.
For needs beyond configuration and plugins, you (or your service
provider) have to ask the producer. No choice here: there is only one.

Example on migration: A producer (lets say MS) has a product (NT4)
with a nice network of service providers to help you with your 1000 NT4
installations. At some point MS decides to stop support (for you
and also for the service providers) so that no more security updates will
follow etc. Now you are forced to migrate or to take a great risk.
You do not have the opportunity to hire a service provider
to patch security update for a further 15 month until you are ready
to migrate to something else.

The reason why there are so many companies successfully offering
service for proprietary products is simply that the market competition
through Free Software has not fully developed yet.

> When you say "However, strong proprietary companies like Esri have the
> tendency to make the users data turn to proprietary formats difficult to
> migrate at a later stage. There is also the strong tendency to move the
> users into a proprietary working environment they can't leave except at very
> high costs" I am not so sure that is correct. What I do see is that I can
> import and export in many file formats in each of ESRI, Intergraph,
> Autodesk, Manifold etc products - virtually all of them support standard
> ASCII files. The issue of migration problems, again, results from the
> techno-centric viewpoint. An alternative approach is to determine what types
> of spatial information are needed and for which purposes dependent upon a
> strategic plan - then acquire software. In a research environment, I doubt
> software capability is the driving force - whereas identifying the spatial
> data needed as related to the hypothesis and study purpose is - the software
> comes secondary.

No matter how simple it sounds talking just about some format issues,
migration is a major problem. Just ask some companies or organisations
that did a serious migration cost estimate. You will be surprised on
the outcome. Doing simple migration cost estimates is a standard job
for proprietary vendors to adjust their prices on updates -
unfortunately it is quite difficult to get such reports ;-).

> I agree that data is the real issue, however, I applaud those corporations
> who do donate products for use. If it results in only one or two people
> improving real world problems then that is the goal and success. If more
> people solve their problems using either proprietary or free software then
> so be it.

You only look at the technical problem. The developing countries will
take a step backword in regard to getting independet from the industrial
countries. To my honest opinion, you create more real
world problems than you solve if you donate proprietary products.

> I also suspect that if there is such a growing concern about
> proprietary formats or other issues, that consumers should provide strong
> feedback to corporations. They likely will respond and you might be
> surprised.

Indeed. But different than you suspect.
Between 'yes, we like open standards and of course our products will
follow them' and what it acually the case is a big difference.

> The trend is already towards highly interoperable systems and
> functionality - that will only grow. The primary issue remains data and
> geo-spatial functionality that is easy to implement.

I see a growth in formats that are controlled. Eg. via patents.

> Perhaps you could explain where the 'free' part comes in, I do not think I
> fully understand it yet.

Think of free as in Freedom.

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

Intevation GmbH	              	     http://intevation.de/
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