By: Anonymous

Anonymous
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 17:55:00 +0000

Andrew, thanks for this post! I participated in the exchange you referenced and agree that it was a healthy discussion. Your follow-up and suggestions for improvement are a great next step.

I completely agree about the need for lists and the vision behind CivicCommons--as a builder of open source IT solutions for government I want lists of all kinds of proprietary software.

My interest in Thursday's conversation relates more to a concern about ESRI than CivicCommons. There are some fundamental requirements that need to baked into all government IT whether open or closed. Unfortunately ESRI appears to be using its monopoly position to undermine those values and is pushing a closed platform strategy that, if successful, will have extremely detrimental consequences for the open software community and users of GIS data in general.

The open gov community has invested many years in defining what open platforms and open data look like (access and platform portability being the most critical). I'm less interested in knowing the "price" of software than I am in understanding how solutions line up with those values.  I'm dubious of simple metrics--for example, the cost of platform lock-in is impossible to calculate.

As you think about CC v2.0 it would be very helpful to create metadata that describes those aspects of the software. Also they aren't simple checkboxes--in ESRI's case they've checked the data portability box but in practice are pushing closed formats and proprietary APIs. The result is something that appears to be helpful but is actually locking us into a completely  closed platform. There will be a variety of perspectives on this depending on the user and the application.

FWIW, I documented me recent encounter with ESRI's close platform strategy here: