[Freegis-list] MapServer/FreeGIS and the market

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 09:11:34AM -0300, Eduardo Patto Kanegae wrote:
> Despite the known high potencial of MapServer and other very useful free gis
> tools, it's still very hard to find MapServer/Free GIS job offers at gis
> jobs websites or other GIS related sites.
> 
> Why do you think this happen this way?
> - do you think mapserver/freegis packs are not sufficient known to get a
> place at commercial media?
> - or could commercial proprietary software companies be doing something to
> avoid free gis from growing up?
> - or does companies know that this kind of professional is more difficult to
> find and then prefer not to loose time on high media announces and look for
> professionals only via people networking?

the companies that are very much oriented towards a Free Software
based business model usually employ people directly because
they know the guys who rock and they know when they get available.
Intevation has employed all of the team this way. But even
we find it sometimes difficult to find cool guys who currently
have no job or don't want to quit their current ;-)

Those companies that basically do proprietary business model
and just added UMN MapServer to their supported products tend
to have their already-there staff to dive into UMN MapServer.
Also, such companies are not able to decide who rocks and who
does not.
I've seen this very often in Germany.

The big companies should actually contract the small companies
to do the works on the Free Software. However, in GIS area there
are not many examples that this happens. Free Software GIS solutions
are usually ignored.

Best

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

Intevation GmbH                      http://intevation.de/
FreeGIS                                http://freegis.org/