[gdal-dev] ESRI file geodatabase support

[Lucena, Ivan]

Matt,

> "While ESRI would ideally like to open the file geodatabase format in a 
> manner similar to what we did for shapefiles when we released ArcView 2, 
> geodatabases are complex and can be easily corrupted outside the ArcGIS 
> environment. Instead, we plan to engineer a high performing and well 
> documented API that developers can freely embed in custom applications 
> and that will read and write file geodatabase datasets. This will be 
> released after ArcGIS 9.3." -- http://bit.ly/esri-uc-qa-2007

IMHO,

That sounds very reasonable. But doesn't explain very well the business model for that initiative. 
It is understandable that by open up the file specification could lead to all sort of problems, 
meaning a lot of technical support calls to Readlands, if other software start building corrupted or 
outdated geodatabase format. But by the other hand, to develop and maintain the API would also be 
costly. So why should they do that? To give to the world a new free format so that people could use 
it without an ArcGIS license? That doesn't make sense to me. The Shapefile format is widely used 
because of Shapelib and I don't think that ESRI has extent a dine on it. And why do we want that 
storage format? Is it that good? If it just to take data in and out of it, could we just use ArcSDE 
based GDAL/OGR drivers?

Regards,

Ivan