[EU] European "partwise" Open Source GIS-Tender

Tue Nov 29 21:41:57 PST 2016

I think, that the buzzword we need to promote here is Open APIs - that
leads to decomposition of the huge task and therefore to possibility to
split one huge service to many

j

On Tue, Nov 29, 2016, 16:41 Dirk Frigne <dirk.frigne at geosparc.com> wrote:

> Thank you Till for sharing this tender,
> Thank you Maria for your comments,
>
> I also was discouraged, reading that Eurostats wants a shift towards
> open source (which is imho the right choice and a very good decision!),
> but at the other hand, strictly restrict part of the experience to one
> particular service provider, with a 4 letter word as abbreviation.
>
> What I think we should do (from OSGeo) is writing a letter where we
> encourage the initiative, present the OSGeo foundation, and ask why the
> tender is not divided in two lots: one for open source services, and one
> for services from a specific proprietary system.
>
> We should also write that a lot of community members of OSGeo, working
> for businesses with an business model based on open source software
> values, are interested to work together to provide an answer to this
> tender, if the specific proprietary know how was not requested. (in
> other words, if there where two separated lots in the tender).
>
> We should mention that we (from the OSGeo community) are convinced that
> solutions fully based on open source technology are a perfect
> replacement for any proprietary system out there today, and that the
> change for vendor lock-in is much smaller with such solutions.
>
> Apart what OSGeo could do, I think we (the individuals belonging to
> commercial service providers) can start an initiative to form a
> consortium so we can provide an answer to such questions if we spot a
> new opportunity.
>
> But even then I think it is very ambitious to shift such an amount of
> 'good professional quality' in such a sort term, that I think that we
> also should promote and work on capacity building trough initiatives
> such as Geo4all.
>
> Dirk
>
>
> On 28-11-16 11:42, María Arias de Reyna wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 11:30 AM,  <till.adams at fossgis.de> wrote:
> >> Dear list!
> >>
> >> I come up, because we stumbled over this tender:
> >> https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/cft/cft-display.html?cftId=1824
> >>
> >> (and although most of you may regard me as the "guy who was chair of
> FOSS4G
> >> 2016 in Bonn", I write as managing director of terrestris and
> mundialis, two
> >> SME's having an Open Source business model.)
> >>
> >> Summary
> >> EUROSTAT, europes statistical agency, is seeking a contracting company,
> that
> >> delivers GIS services worth 17.5 million €uros for the upcoming 4 years
> (or
> >> ~7.5k person days per year !!).
> >> In the tender they define two main technical directions: ESRI and Open
> >> Source - and they name every popular OSGeo project such as GeoServer,
> >> Geonetwork Open Source, OpenLayers, QGIS, PostGIS, GRASS etc..
> >> Also they clearly define, that Open Source must be favoured, if ever
> >> possible.
> >>
> >>
> >> My thoughts:
> >> Regarding our Open Source business landscape, I see huge problems for
> any of
> >> our Open Source SME's to have any chance in even participate in this
> tender.
> >> Nobody of us, even if we all would come together, could approximately
> >> deliver such an amount of person days and we are not able to prove that
> we
> >> can deliver knowledge in ESRI technology to their reasonable
> satisfaction.
> >> My guess is, that on the proprietary side of the market there are huge
> full
> >> service companies, that are capable in delivering these magnitudes of
> >> services and who can argue "yes, we can also deliver Open Source
> knowledge".
> >> Our landscape of service providers with an open business model is quite
> >> heterogeneous with many small and medium-sized companies, often very
> >> specialized on single aspects or software packages. This will in the end
> >> lead to the fact, that even if EU favours to use Open Source Software,
> these
> >> services are provided not from companies from our community.
> >>
> >> And this matters two things in my eyes:
> >> 1. The money paid for Open Source will not (or only partwise) be
> invested
> >> into our community and into our projects
> >> 2. The contracted service provider will presumably not favour Open
> Source
> >> software and with that the goal clearly defined by EUROSTAT degenerates
> to a
> >> well-intentioned idea
> >>
> >>
> >> What I want:
> >> In general I wanted to let you all know about this tender and the
> drifts,
> >> that also in the EU take place towards Open Source. All together I
> would be
> >> happy, if we can start a discussion about how to deal with tenders like
> this
> >> in the future and how we, as an European Community, can operate towards
> the
> >> EU for a better understanding of Open Source and also our Open Source
> >> business models.
> >>
> >>
> >> BTW: Also a good discussion on this here on this list could be a good
> >> starting point to show the appropriate people from EU, that we are here!
> >> Happy about any contribution to this!
> >>
> >> Till
> >>
> >
> > Hi Till,
> >
> > Part of the idea of the european chapter was precisely to be able to
> > ¿lobby? in favor of open source. (I am not sure if lobby is the right
> > word, in Spanish it has a bad meaning, related to corruption). In
> > GeoCat we discussed this internally and it was very discouraging that
> > it was so ESRI oriented.
> >
> > While we solve the legal issues about setting up an official european
> > chapter (which reminds me, we have a list of TO-DO things pending!),
> > what do you suggest we can do? Maybe write a formal letter signed by
> > many european companies asking the European Commission to avoid naming
> > specific companies or software? Maybe we can try to set up a meeting
> > with the responsible persons of this tender to try to explain the good
> > things about being more open (and how the money will be reinvested in
> > local companies instead of the big monopolistic one)?
> >
> > Regards,
> > María.
> > _______________________________________________
> > EU mailing list
> > EU at lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/eu
> >
>
> --
> Yours sincerely,
>
>
> ir. Dirk Frigne
> CEO @geosparc
>
> Geosparc n.v.
> Brugsesteenweg 587
> B-9030 Ghent
> Tel: +32 9 236 60 18
> GSM: +32 495 508 799
>
> http://www.geomajas.org
> http://www.geosparc.com
>
> @DFrigne
> be.linkedin.com/in/frigne
>
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