[OSGeo-Discuss] Case studies for migrating to Geospatial FOSS?

[Alex Mandel]

Cameron Shorter wrote:
> After giving a presentation recently about Geospatial Open Source, we
> were asked whether there have been any case studies on migration to
> Geospatial Open Source.
> 
> The audience were very sympathetic to Open Source, but felt is would
> be much easier to sell to upper management if they could draw upon
> experiences of other agencies who have done something similar.
> 
> Can anyone point me to reports, or programs which have migrated from
> ESRI/Oracle applications (ArcGIS in particular) to Open Source
> equivalents?
> 

I guess one of the odd parts about this is that several government 
agencies went open source to begin with for some things.

CDF was mapping fires in California with Mapserver in 2003
Nasa wrote Worldwind and invests in other applications.
Quite a few governments in Europe seem to fund gvsig and some other tools.
Grass started as a US gov project and if you look through the manuals, 
you'll find government workers in things like Army Core of Engineers 
authoring the manual.
FGDC and CIA both run Plone for their webserver.(Not exactly GIS but 
abstractly related)

I'll poke around for some converts though since I understand the cause.

Alex