[postgis-users] Help in Defending FOSS SDI

[Bèrto ëd Sèra]

Hi all,

one thing you may want to point out to the Indian Authorities is also that
the phrase "A highly scalable system may therefore be confronted with high
license costs" should be be understood according to what geoinformation is.
A large system has a large number of potential external users, many of which
DO NOT get financed from the same source.

A national govt may well be (at least temporarily) rich enough to scale
proprietary software, but the local govt cannot, so cannot NGOs and other
actors that can actually play a big role in creating and managing additional
information layers, if they are allowed to do it. So the concept of
"scalability" needs to be read not as a constant, in the case of proprietary
software, but rather as space with higly modulated local needs. Yet, no
matter how modulated they get, a zero cost fits them all.

There is also, obviously, the question of resource availability. How many
programmers can you hire at an acceptable price to cope with proprietary
software vs FOSS? If you are interested in producing such comparison I can
have a look at my contacts in India. I'm aware of some organisations that
deal with FOSS in India, and I suppose they can provide us with cost
comparisons.

Bèrto
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