[Freegis-list] relationship between Open Source GIS and open standards

[Daniel Morissette]

Bart van den Eijnden wrote:
> 
> I was wondering why there is such a strong link between Open Source GIS  
> and open standards, such as the OGC standards. Some of the reasons I 
> could  think of are:
> 
> -OGC often uses Open Source projects as their reference implementation  
> (Deegree for WMS, Geoserver for WFS, Deegree for CS-W)
> 
> -Open Source projects sometimes start without having a native 
> interface,  so when they are in search of an interface they are more 
> likely to end up  implementing open standard interfaces
> 
> I am interested to see if I am missing some viewpoints on this issue.
> 

Personally I think the main reason is that it is in the best interest of 
open source developers and of their users to make sure that their 
software can talk to as many other packages as possible... and OGC 
standards are a natural way to achieve this.

This is the opposite of the "vendor-locking" techniques used by several 
proprietary software vendors to make sure that it is painful enough to 
switch to a competitor that nobody will ever dare to do it. I'm not 
saying that all proprietary software vendors are evil and doing this 
vendor-locking thing, but in their priority list, interoperability 
naturally comes lower than selling software licenses.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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