[OSGeo-Discuss] [Analysis] Geospatial server deployment statistics

[Jonathan Moules]

Hi All,
At the risk of engaging in self-promotion, this may be of interest to 
the community.

I've just finished an analysis of what geospatial server software's 
behind the ~2.2 million WMS/WFS/WCS/WMTS datasets that GeoSeer has in 
its search-engine index.

The extremely short version of things likely of interest here:

* ArcGIS has by far the most deployments: 2,755 (53.70%); other 
proprietary is a rounding error.

* GeoServer is the second most popular for deployments (964 (18.79%)), 
and hosts by far the most datasets: 963,603 (43.26%).

* MapServer has a very healthy deployment count too: 544 (10.6%), and 
serves a considerable number of datasets: 389,709 (17.49%).

* Put another way, at least 2/3rds of the world's geospatial data that's 
served via OGC standards is served by Open Source software (mostly 
OSGeo). And over 60% between GeoServer and MapServer alone.

* So basically it looks like many city/county/provincials have an ArcGIS 
Server install and use that for (occasionally token!) compliance with 
"open data" edicts, but the full-on SDI data warehouses almost all go 
for Open Source.

You can find (much) more detail (+ numbers for a bunch of the other 
OSGeo projects) in the (ad-free, tracking-free, cookie-free, 
javascript-free, in fact both free and Free!) blog post:
https://www.geoseer.net/blog/?p=2020-06-04_geospatial_server_software


So yes, good job to everyone who contributes in any way to all these 
projects! Hopefully this reinforces how useful they are; maybe you can 
use it in future work-bids too (its the sort of thing that reassures 
management). Could also be be useful when it comes to figuring out where 
limited OSGeo funds will have most impact.

Comments/thoughts/discussion/feedback welcome (on or off list).
Cheers,
Jonathan