By: Spike

Spike
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Thanks for this Andrew, I was very surprised the first time I saw ArcGIS popup in the marketplace. Was confusing for a while, and then disappointing that so many commercial tools were appearing, the commercial marketing machine in well oiled action. But your concept is sound and I think will be a fantastic ecosystem to help gov CIOs make better informed decisions. Having the side by side info on proprietary and open source options is going to be a huge time saver and a crucial awareness/marketing tool for the opensource solutions that dont have advocacy or PR arms to promote them, besides a passionate user community, and besides OpenGeo perhaps.

Perhaps when we move beyond 1.0 we can start to build in more comparative measures in the system such as the costs, license scaling paths, hardware needs and also something of a forum for those who have implemented to discuss and rate their experiences would further help people make better informed decisions- if you see that CIOs typically dont fall in love with their Oracle Spatial solutions but do express satisfaction with a PostGIS approach then you have a richer set of metrics to work with.

Just to complicate life, it would be powerful to see if we could capture the volume of new uses of open tech and monetize the cumulative savings that CC has helped to realize!