[OSGeo-Discuss] [Ica-osgeo-labs] How to quantify the economic impact of OSGeo software? Your help needed for a research article

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Suchith Anand
<Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:

> The missed economic and innovation opportunities are too big to be quantified. Students instead of being developed as creative innovative minds and future innovators turn to be just users of a particular properitory software. I think this is big moral question for educators and policy makers.
>
> The quote from Eben Upton , Cofounder of  Raspberry Pi initiative  is something all educators and  policy makers should give deep thinking "The lack of programmable hardware for children – the sort of hardware we used to have in the 1980s – is undermining the supply of eighteen-year-olds who know how to program, so that's a problem for universities, and then it's undermining the supply of 21 year olds who know how to program, and that's causing problems for industry."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

Another example is cloud computing. It is really open source which
made cloud computing possible: using commodity hardware and
distributed computing instead of centralised expensive servers was
simply not feasible using the licensing models of proprietary
software. They are adopting now - but they didn't set the trend. On
the other hand of the spectrum the same is true for lightweight
devices (netbooks; smartphones, IOT).

Anyway, I just want to tell also that money as an indicator of value
is very skewed based on purchasing power.I find mapping in developing
countires (just a random example: [1]) valuable, but expressed in
money it may be much less than eg tools which find the best store
location in a developed country.

Kind Regards,
Johan

[1] http://blog.smc.org.in/mapping-efforts-in-an-unsurveyed-land-koorachundu/