Hobu, Inc.

The decision of whether or not to respond to Dimitri Rotow’s (scroll down to Letters to the Editor) screed against open source GIS software
(among a bunch of other things) in this week’s edition of GIS Monitor is a difficult one. By
responding, do I validate the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt)? How do you respond to someone who
is clearly off his rocker with a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease?

Rather than go point by point through his nonsense, I think instead that I’ll go over some of the
ridiculous ones. First, a quote:

There are no open source GIS products out there of any merit.

This statement has a couple of problems. I don’t even know how to respond to the comment about
no open source GIS products having merit. Actually, what does he mean by merit anyway?

Saleable merit?
That’s not true. There are entire companies out there built around sales and support of open source
GIS products.

Technical merit?
Many of technical advances in GIS and computing come from academia and governments who
can support their development (it’s too hard to cost recover these kinds of things). Then they are picked
up by opportunistic companies (think of SAS or ESRI, which have made gonzo money doing this), folded
into software, and sold as “features.” ESRI, SAS, and yes, even Manifold have done this (I highly doubt
that their much touted support of PNG in their products is their own implementation).

Useablilty merit?
He may have a small point here, but his reasoning is all wrong. The reason why some
open source software is not as polished from a useability aspect is because the users of the software
haven’t demanded it yet. It is not because open source developers are poor developers or poorly organized.
On the other hand, if you take an open source project like Firefox, which has
millions of users, useability and polish start to become very prominent and important. Like a wise man
once said, “The last 10% takes 90% of the time.”

So, they create products for operating system environments that (statistically) no one uses. If they wanted lots of people to actually use their products, they’d create them for Windows.

I don’t know where Dmitri gets this idea. Almost all of the software on freegis.org
can be compiled and made run on Windows just as easily as any other operating system. As for the comment about
operating systems that no one (statistically) uses, let’s just say that 5% of x million is statistically significant
(disclosure: I work at the Statistics department at Iowa State University). Also, I’d like to note, that it’s the
operating system who’s marketshare is growing that is important, not the one with a stagnant/saturated market.

It’s not Internet that’s broadened usage of GIS, it is the ubiquitous availability of PC clones running Windows that anyone can afford coupled with the emergence of full-power, best-in-the-world GIS applications like Manifold that sell for under $250.

Dmitri’s reading of the tea leaves (or stems and seeds, rather) is dead wrong here. His complaint about “true” GIS
needing to be done on the desktop is wrong as well. MapQuest (and Google Maps) are the largest GIS applications
out there in terms of numbers of users. ESRI now touts ArcServer as their biggest growing product, and everyone
and their brother in the GIS software world is/has been jumping into the internet mapping space. The market
is clearly going this direction, whether or not folks like Dmitri want to believe it.

The great majority of GIS users are doing GIS in Microsoft environments on desktop boxes and they are completely ignoring both OGC and GML.

That may be true, but the governments and agencies that you yourself say provide all the data that you
need to use in GIS are not ignoring OGC developments. These organizations have larger goals, and getting
out of the data lock-in trap is clearly one of them. You, as a software provider that is completely dependent
on using data that is provided by these organizations, will have to live with it. And you already do. Your
latest service release of your product has OGC WMS listed as the first item.

Responding to trolls is tiring… more later. Btw, Manifold’s own webserver uses that “obsolete” operating system called Linux. See the Netcraft survey here.

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