[postgis-users] Re: Conformance testing

[Bill Binko]

On Wed, 11 May 2005, Martin Daly wrote:

> > 	I have to agree. It's probably not worth mentioning on the intro
> > page. I was just curious. 
> > 	It's interesting that the OGC would want to discourage 
> > open source
> > and perhaps indicates where their loyalty lies. PostGIS would 
> > appear to be
> > an ideal fit for implementation of WMS and WFS sites, which has to be
> > disturbing to some commercial interests but great news for application
> > developers.
> 
> Wrong.  Wrong.  Wrong.  You obviously do not know that the reference
> implementations of WMS (deegree), WFS (GeoServer), WCS and CS-W (both
> deegree again I think) are all Open Source.  These were paid for out of
> OGC testbed sponsorship monies.
> 
> Where Open Source may fall between the cracks in the OGC compliance
> framework is that the compliance certification (actually a Trademark
> Licence Agreement contract) requires an "owner" of the product, and a
> payment.  The TLA is protecting the OGC "brand", so OGC sees the need to
> have a contract to do so.  Otherwise, how would OGC (for want of a
> better word) "punish" contraventions, e.g. claiming compliance where
> none has been gained?
> 
> OGC is also not a charity.  The TLA fees go towards supporting the
> compliance tests, which can be a considerable amount of work to develop
> and maintain.  For an OGC Associate Member (like Refractions), with
> gross annual revenue of up to US $50 million (wild guess: this covers
> Refractions), the TLA fee for a single product is less than US $1000.
> The fees are staged so that, for revenues of less than US $1 million,
> the fee is US $80.  These hardly seem prohibitively expensive.  You can
> check all of the fees here:
> http://www.opengeospatial.org/resources/?page=testing&view=testfees
> 
> I am well aware that OGC is far from perfect, but please check your
> facts before making similarly bold assertions.

Martin, thanks for chiming in.

While I have not been involved in OGC standards, I was my day-job
company's OMG member for several years.  The biggest reason I heard for
charging for compliance testing was that they wanted some "minimal barrier
to entry" to keep the workload of their testers and conformance document
team down.  It also ensures that only firms who expect to pass conformance 
testing apply.

Personally, I think OGC's prices are trivial ($100/year for small firms?). 

If you look at the other side of the coin, sometimes we _rely_ on products
that claim OGC compliance.  Knowing that the developing firm was confident
enough to spend SOME cash on the compliance testing helps makes the
statement "OGC Compliant" meaningful.

It is true that it's hard to judge the "annual revenues" from PostGIS (or 
other OGC-compliant products like Mapserver).  However, my project will 
not be pro-bono: I intend to leverage this product in a commercial 
venture.  And if PostGIS helped bring me in > $1M next year, I'd be happy 
to spend the $250 to help the PostGIS community attract more commercial 
users who can fund development.  

-Bill