[Portugal] The Economics of Geospatial Software

[Hugo]

  Sent to you by Hugo via Google Reader: The Economics of Geospatial
Software via Slashgeo by Satri on 10/22/09
I plan to share a whole lot of great FOSS4G-related geonews starting
next Monday (I'm too busy enjoying the conference until then ;-).
Here's a teaser while you wait: the great keynote given by OpenGeo's
Paul Ramsey about the economics of open source geospatial software.
Here's the three-parts talk on YouTube. Paul is not only funny, he's
particularly insightful. He addresses what is central to businesses:
not software but rather a product which, in addition to the actual
software, includes training, support, certifications, updates, online
services, etc. Software only 'lives' because it 'feeds' on developers.
Whether proprietary or open source, if there aren't developers anymore,
the software dies out of starvation (obsolescence, incompatibilities,
unattended bugs, etc). Paul argues that the developers bassin from
which the software feeds is much larger and less constrained for open
source software, which thus have better chances of growing and
evolving. In order to attract mainstream users (e.g. large
organizations) to open source geospatial software, geospatial
businesses interested in living on open source must sell the full suit
of services related to the 'product' they offer. Even major proprietary
geospatial software companies are 'feeding' open source geospatial
software with 'developer time' or financial resources, including ESRI,
Google, FME and others, because their geospatial products directly
benefit from open source geospatial software. I encourage you to watch
Paul's 30-minutes talk on YouTube (see link above), it's worth.
Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Things you can do from here:
- Subscribe to Slashgeo using Google Reader
- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your
favorite sites
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/portugal/attachments/20091023/5e4177e3/attachment.html