All Bikes Weigh The Same
Bicyclists have a saying: “All bikes weigh the same.”
Indeed, a 20-pound bike needs a 30-pound lock; a 30-pound bike needs a 20-pound lock. A 50-pound bike does not need a lock.
I was reminded of this fact of life as I was following (and occasionally chiming in on) James Fee’s Open Thread, mostly about how “free” open source GIS is. Dimitri from Manifold brings up a few good points to the discussion, such as:
“If you make what you think is a "free" service the linchpin of your GIS work, you'll eventually find out it is not free at all, it is a commercial product that is as commercial as, say, ArcInfo. It's just got fewer features and less performance and requires endless mashups with your own time invested in software development if you ever want to do anything with it that significantly approaches GIS. You know, the whole re-inventing the wheel thing. And, if it continues to be crushingly uneconomic for the company that hosts it, as competition inevitably arrives you could find it is no longer around.”
and“A good example is Linux, which has to my mind been an appalling waste of a generation or two of programmers in a narcissistic effort to re-engineer an operating system that was already grossly obsolete in the late 1980s, with no greater point, apparently, than substituting some private intellectual property ownership of some core parts of the model OS upon which it is based from AT&T's ownership into Red Hat ownership. Linux now is much more expensive than UNIX was.”
Just like a biker ends up carrying more or less the same weight -- whether as a bike or as a lock, the GIS system users end up paying, one way or another. They pay the software vendor if they choose a commercial platform, or they pay the implementer (in staff time or consultant fees) to glue together the pieces of the “free” solution.
In the end, all bikes weigh the same.
Posted by Atanas Entchev at 2/16/2008 3:48 PM 
Categories: blog,Opinion,GIS,Open Source,IT,Technology,Business
Tags: blog Opinion GIS Open Source IT Technology Business
Categories: blog,Opinion,GIS,Open Source,IT,Technology,Business
Tags: blog Opinion GIS Open Source IT Technology Business
Hmm, the bikes may weigh the same but if I challenge you to a race which bike will you choose? Ultimately it's a question of productivity. Free and open, free or commercial, it's all about how you can get the most value for the least cost.
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Aaron:
You say: "...it's all about how you can get the most value for the least cost." Correct! But 'cost' and 'value' have multiple dimensions, not just monetary.
My post's primary intention was to disspell the widely-held (in some user circles) belief that open source equals (or should equal) free.
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If that was your intention, why quote and applaud pure FUD from Dimitri?
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It is my responsibility to my readers/clients/prospects to present all sides of an issue. I am not 'applaud'-ing Dimitri's position, just quoting it. On the other hand, I am not sure it's FUD, either.
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But you're not presenting all sides of the issue, just presenting the juicy flamebait from the proprietary side and then calling it all a wash between proprietary and open source. I don't see how this helps educate your readers.
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Sean:
Your comments make me realize that I probably appear biased towards proprietary, which can't be further from the truth, and is evident to all who know me. But, of course, most readers don't know me, so I should have stated my position on open source clearly. Let me do that now.
I am a staunch advocate of open source. My browser of choice has been Firefox since release 0.7. Likewise, Thunderbird is my email client. My team developed http://njfindaride.org on the LAMP platform. I use Open Office whenever I can.
Having said all that, I also have to say that I have encountered a series of obstacles in expanding my use of FOSS. One such obstacle is the high adoption and penetration rate of proprietary software in the marketplace. I encounter resistance from clients and prospects, who equate ‘ArcView’ with ‘GIS’. I encounter resistance from my support staff, who are used to Outlook and Internet Explorer, and generally think that all things Microsoft are easy.
I hope this clarifies where I’m coming from.
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