[OSGeo-Discuss] Would you be concerned if the "GeoServices REST API" became an OGC standard?

[TC Haddad]

On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Adrian Custer <acuster at gmail.com> wrote:

> The dominance of ESRI is controversial both because the working mode
lacked any collaborative spirit and, perhaps > most critically, because
this is seen as a way through which ESRI can bring its own service onto an
equal footing
> with the current, public OGC standards in the government procurement
game. Governments are shifting towards
> requiring that all spatial software conform with published, open
standards; the proposed standard, if adopted, would > allow ESRI to push
its own software as also an "Open Standard" and compete on an unequal
footing with
> implementations of the software being worked on by everyone else.

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To elaborate on the "unequal footing" phrase above:

One additional aspect of the government side of this equation is that for
several years there has been a trend (similar to Microsoft products) in
getting the ESRI architecture adopted as a GIS software standard
within government IT enterprise contexts. This then requires agencies to
transition to use of the ESRI platform exclusively for geospatial work.

Projecting into the future, if there were 2 competing OGC service types and
ESRI were to drop support for the older W*S family of OGC services (or
merely push support for them out of the core packages and into an expensive
interoperability add-on), this would place many agencies in a situation of
only being able to serve the newer standards, effectively killing the older
standards within those contexts...
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