[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Technology Group, Inc. announces PostGIS & UMN MapServer Training

Sun Jan 20 02:33:42 PST 2008

Arnulf,
Excellent soap box speech. I'd love you to put it on a web page 
somewhere so that I can reference it next time this topic comes up. A 
wiki might be good so that we can collectively tweak it (as you suggest).

Arnulf Christl wrote:
> Howard Butler wrote:
>>
>> On Jan 17, 2008, at 1:34 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:
>>> If you were to lead the development of this material and put it into 
>>> the Open Source (with your name attached) this would give you extra 
>>> credibility and marketing reach.
>>
>> Why?  Why must OTG put their hard earned training materials in the 
>> public domain and give them away for free for "extra credibility"?  
>> What would then be the incentive for someone to pay $$$ to go to an 
>> intensive training session?  
>
> Entrepreneurs, we have thoroughly analyzed this aspect over the past 
> years and come to the conclusion that publishing course material 
> openly is not detrimental to earning money. Quite the contrary it even 
> helps us making more business. The added value is generated at several 
> levels including both hard cash and marketing (find out details 
> below). As active FOSSGIS software contributors we are happy to foster 
> and promote the projects that we are involved with. In some cases (for 
> example MapServer and PostGIS) this is the only way that we can give 
> back our 2Ct contribution.
> To better understand the involved factors we have studied uses cases 
> in detail. First we have grouped our clients into three distinct 
> categories who *use* our course material, these are: * Experts
> * Students
> * Professionals
>
> Then we have identified three distinct groups who *profit* from having 
> course material released under an open and free license. These are: * 
> Clients (~users, as categorized  above) * Creators (for example the 
> WhereGroup or Chandler OTG who produce "Intellectual Property") * the 
> FOSSGIS project and communities that are in the focus of the training 
> material (here MapServer and PostGIS).
>
> A multidimensional matrix would probably make this transparent but 
> unfortunately I am too dumb to create it and will need to use words to 
> explain the dependencies.
> 1. Real Experts (hackers, nerds, freaks). They would never pay for our 
> courses because they are too damn smart. They wont offer courses 
> themselves (which would be detrimental to our business) because it 
> would bore them to death. But they still profit from having access to 
> material because it will speed up understanding the corresponding 
> FOSSGIS project. This will make them choose this project one over 
> another one because good developers are also lazy. This is good for 
> the FOSSGIS project and community because those people listen to what 
> those real experts have to say, recommend, etc. Hard to measure - but 
> unquestionably there.
> 2. Students. They will not be able to pay our rates anyway, so we do 
> not loose anything if we give them the material for free. Quite the 
> contrary, when those students leave school and come into a position 
> where they have to decide where to go - who you'r gonna ask - 
> Ghostbusters. This is a long term strategy that only market leaders 
> can follow. Corporations Besides that students can potentially also 
> enhance the course material, keep it up to date, etc. But only if it 
> is available under a FOSS license, etc. This currently does not happen 
> because universities and educational personnel are still in the late 
> sixties wrt their knowledge about Open Source but so what. We have to 
> be patient. Eventually the old farts who don't get it will be replaced 
> by those that we have helped educate with our freely available course 
> material and Bingo! If you lock your training material away and treat 
> it as "Intellectual Property" you will be the only idiot who invests 
> keeping it up to date. Why not exploit those who are prepared to give 
> (FOSS4G 08, Keynote by Damian Conway)?
>
> 3. Professionals: Those are the ones that pay us money. They have a 
> problem on their hand, a budget to solve it and limited time. These 
> are the ones we love, we live off them. They would never bother to try 
> and learn by themselves with freely available material because they 
> have the resources to do it professionally and get somebody to explain 
> it to them. They don't have the time to learn it by themselves. If 
> they don't have the budget, they are not interesting to us anyway.
> All folks from these three groups will see who created the course 
> material and will memorize them as the experts on the topic. The GNU 
> FDL license has a clause where invariant sections can be defined, 
> typically this could be the front page and back cover, there you can 
> find the authors, company logo and web site links or the creators' 
> individual address, contacts. Link to the repository where the 
> document is maintained, mailing list or whatever you want to advertise 
> as important for this publication.
> Therefore our competitors who offer the same training courses with our 
> material (Outrageous! My "Property") always advertise us as the real 
> real experts. Who're you gonna ask if you really wanna know?
> Lastly - and so important that I cannot stress this enough - obviously 
> the Software Project is going to profit. Because the largest open gash 
> in FOSS' outward image is missing, rotten and wrong documentation and 
> training materials. If you miss that people don't want you and go 
> elsewhere. This is why EduCom is so important to OSGeo (intellectual 
> cross post).
>
> My usual rate for this kind of consultancy is €145,- per hour plus 
> taxes. Writing this mail took me one hour (finding out the detail took 
> a little while longer though). From an OSGeo perspective all this 
> amounts to just a little more than 1€Ct because the greenback 
> unfortunately is so bad these days... This is frustrating and makes 
> one wonder why to produce anything for free.
> I probably missed some things and got others wrong because I am just a 
> professional and not an expert. If you are an expert and know which 
> parts I got wrong, please let me know - then I can also profit from 
> this discussion. If it gets us anywhere we could also add this to the 
> Wiki.
>
>> IMO, what OTG is doing is a very classical business model of Open 
>> Source development.  Publishers like O'Reilly, Apress, Springer or 
>> our own FOSS4G event workshops (did you know FOSS4G cleared 100k this 
>> year? ;) ) follow this exact model.
>>
>> The fact that OTG sees an opportunity to do this and has put forth 
>> effort in developing materials is a signal there's a market there and 
>> it is an indirect measurement of those projects' success -- not a 
>> failure of the projects' documentation efforts.  Not everyone has the 
>> time to go learn all of this stuff on their own or the ability to 
>> travel to FOSS4G and hope one of the workshops covers what they 
>> need.  I applaud OTG for developing a curriculum and providing 
>> training services to serve this market, and I think the osgeo-discuss 
>> is a perfect place for an announcement like this.
>>
>> Howard
>
> Does this mean that all businesses providing this kind of service 
> should now spam this list with their latest announcements? Maybe we 
> can add an announcement feature to the SPD which appears in the news 
> section for a few days? I just added a link to the EPR project 
> OpenBravo (little content but looks professional) as a new reference 
> site of how the SPD can be integrated into OSGeo's portal pages:
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/SPD_Prioritization
>
> Best regards, Arnulf.
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-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
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