Go Open Source!

Since I joined my current job last year, I worked hard to convince my bosses to employ Open Source components for all our products. Considering the research environment we work in, and the target audience, I was convinced that opting Open Source is the best bet for us. The legacy systems was have are all based on commercial software. Well, it is just about to change and I'm quite excited.

This will be a 180-degree policy shift for our products - until now, the products have been using commercial software for all purposes. The operating system, the Internet Mapping Server (IMS) for WebGIS, the relational database, etc are all the flagship products of some well known corporations. My drive to move to open source stemmed from essentially two reasons:

• Our products are primarily developed for folks in the developing world (like Africa), and the heavy costs of commercial software inhibits them from owning these products. Also, we can not distribute the products we developed because of licensing restrictions.
  
• The commercial GIS products we use - in my opinion- are of very less quality and are unable to handle large loads of data. Plus, in our case, it really came down to "watching" the software, especially our IMS and spatial data gateway, manually and restarting the crashed processes almost 10% of time! Imagine that!
  

Going for Open Source is definitely an chartered territory, especially many research and government institutions heavily opt using commercial software. With open source software, in my opinion, not only can we have better software at no cost, we can freely distribute this product to people in the developing world without worrying about any hefty fees or nasty licenses. What more? All the software we use is platform independent, so if some of our partners use a commercial operating system (like Microsoft's .. what's the name of that operating system?), they can still run our software out-of-the-box!

First line of our products are ready to be out late December. Some of them are already running as "beta" (a la Web 2.0). They all run on Linux and use open source software like Minnesota MapServer (WebGIS), GDAL/GRASS (GIS), PostgreSQL (relational database), PostGIS (spatial gateway), PHP (Web-CGI), etc. We are certainly going to be one of the few people that are going 100% Open Source in phases, and I'm quite proud of pushing the agenda of Open Source! Quite a few of our big-name partners are interested in going Open Source and I only hope that this will continue the success of Open Source GIS.

Conclusions with Open Source GIS and software? We found Open Source GIS to be far better than their commercial counterparts, and so was our impression with the relational database, and operating system (Linux needs no introduction!).

Free world, free people, free speech, free software! How sweet!