[OSGeo-Discuss] Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 04:28:20PM +0200, Cédric Moullet wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I read these interesting answers and I'd like to bring my point of view. I
> know, I'm quite new in the OSGEO world (1 year, previously by Autodesk and
> other "porprietary" structures), but I'm sorry (and unhappy) to say that the
> GIS leaders (ESRI, Autdoesk, Intergraph etc...) don't see OSGEO has an
> important contradictor: from my point of view, this is what needs to be
> changed in the next 5 years.
> 
> I see several reasons that explain the current situation:
> - The majority of OSGEO software are dependent of a few heroic developers or
> a few heroic companies that have nothing in comparison with the GIS leaders.
> With the same idea, the OSGEO is depending of a few persons that have
> another job and do that "as extra" (how many incubation requests pending ?)
> - There is almost no marketing (comparing to GIS leaders) done around the
> OSGEO Software
> - A large part of the GIS market is not addressed by OSGEO Software. I'm
> particularly thinking to the industry that need to invest billions of
> dollars (if you don't believe me, please ask Geoff ;-) and OSGEO has for now
> no stacks that is able to answer these need.
> - The OSGEO is very developer centric and probably need more input from
> management, end user, marketing etc...

I think that all of these things center around a primarily different
desire for OSGeo than I personally have.

My goal is to: 
 * Support projects and allow them to succeed
 * Support developers and users and allow them to succeed

An organization like the Free Software Foundation, for example, wants to 
educate people that Free Software is the only Option that people should 
choose. I do not believe that this should be the role of OSGeo. Instead,
I think OSGeo should take a role of supporting developers in pursuing their
projects. If someone wants to compete with ESRI -- that's fine. We should
support them insofar as we can with community resources, shared userbases,
and feedback. But it is not the job of OSGeo to make these projects
successful -- only to help them succeed based on their own efforts.

For this reason, efforts like "Marketing" are (in my opinion) less important
than, for example, setting up a test server for running buildbot, or other
things that help software become successful. We have already seen ibg
companies like ESRI and Google using open source software within their
applications -- this type of commercially successful effort did not require
marketing on the behalf of OSGeo projects. They simply were the best
tool for the job.

The job of OSGeo should be to provide the resources for educated users to
make the correct decisions, if they seek them. Pushing the information 
to people who are currently happy with non-OSGeo solutions seems (to me)
to be far less important in the big scheme of things.

Best Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer