Podcast: Three Paths to Open Source Geospatial

By Joe Francica and Adena Schutzberg
February 03, 2009

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Open source is in the news again. This past week the U.S. Department of Defense announced Forge.mil, an open source project repository akin to SourceForge. Last month President Obama tapped Sun Co-founder Scott McNealy to prepare a document on open source and its potential role in government. But what of open source GIS? How is that corner of geospatial being funded and groomed for growth? We'll look at three paths that have led to open source growth and their likelihood for success in the coming months and years.

Show Notes

The deadline to submit an abstract for the 2009 ESRI Business GIS Summit has been extended to February 13th. The Summit will take place May 4-6 in Denver, Colorado. Be part of this one-of-a-kind forum by submitting your work to share your GIS experiences and knowledge with other business professionals and industry leaders. For more information visit the information or to submit an abstract.

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Change to Open Geospatial (#1) by Archie Belaney, Grey Owl Analytics
Date: February 3, 2009 15:56 PM

Migration to Open Geospatial in the Federal Government?

The change cost to accomplish a wholesale migration to "real" open geospatial applications in the Federal Government is staggering.

The cost will be in changing mindsets, re-wiring virtually every geospatial application extant in the Government, and re-training the workforce to NOT use ESRI as the default.

Open Geospatial is a completely practical, really cool and fundamentally correct idea that will never happen.

Openness and Kundra (#2) by Archie Belaney, Grey Owl Analytics
Date: February 6, 2009 14:24 PM

With Vivek Kundra replacing Karen Evans as the IT wonk for OMB, there might (maybe) be a shred of hope for Open systems in Federal geospatial.

The Geospatial Line of Business will be the measure of his effectiveness. If it becomes just another ELA vehicle for ESRI, we'll know he's unable to move the needle. But if there's an open-source breakout and focus on open access to data - real sharing - then he will have made an impact.

Let's hope the Fed geospatial folks try to support the latter, rather than just go with the flow and take a business as usual path to ESRI-expansion.

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