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Gis Foss: Alternatives To COTS Is It Time For A Change?
Gis Foss: Alternatives To COTS Is It Time For A Change?
Alternatives to COTS
Is it time for a change?
Blair Adams
Chief Consulting Officer
City and County of San Francisco
April 5th, 2007
Agenda
• Why now?
Maturity of FOSS
• Virtual Appliances
• Creative Commons
Technological Perfect Storm?
• Examples
Resources
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Why Now?
• Web 2.0 raises the web GIS bar
Grandma can use it now
• Open standards facilitate Service Oriented Architecture
• Web Feature Service (WFS), vector
Web Map Service (WMS), raster
• Keyhole Markup Lookup (KML), vector
• ‘Legacy’ open source paves the path
Apache most popular webserver since April 1996
• 60% websites use Apache today
Netcraft Web Server Survey (January, 2007)
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Maturity of FOSS
• Linux ~ University of Helsinki, 1991
Apache ~ NCSA, 1994
• PostgreSQL ~ Cal 1970’s
• PostGIS ~ Refractions Research, 2001
MapServer ~ University of Minnesota
• OpenLayers ~ OSGeo, 2006
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Virtualization
• Virtual Machines
Highly portable (i.e. location and architecture)
• Faster installation
• Simplified replication of development and
production environments
Virtual Appliance
• Bundled preconfigured application stacks
• Removes complexity from open source
configuration
Example:
• MapSnack, June 2005
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Creative Commons
• The power of numbers through collaboration
Why continue to reinvent the wheel?
• Steve McDonald of Red Cross adds bass
‘virtually’ to create Red blood cells
• Jack and Meg White approve after the fact
Skip the intermediaries
The Internet is about collaboration
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Technological
Perfect Storm?
• Facilitated by the popularity of Service Oriented
Architecture and Web 2.0:
Virtual ‘Portability’
• Blade / SANs
• Maturity of Open Source
Rich thinclient
• Reduced upfront costs (similar TCO)
• Creative Commons
Mashups
• Power of numbers
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Open Source
Architecture
Source: Geonetwork-opensource.org
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Twin Stacks
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TCO
• Reduced cost barrier to entry
TCO likely equivalent in longrun
• Reduced management and operations costs
• Greater uptime, no license agreements,
invoices, forced updates, less virus prone,
reduced chance of obsolescence
Built modular with integration in mind
• No ‘data vaulting’ with proprietary formats
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Examples
• Web 2.0 GIS Examples:
• http://dev.openlayers.org/sandbox/emanuel/animatedZoom
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/editingtoolbar.html
• http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/openmnnd.html
• http://149.139.16.27/kamap/
http://enplan.com/mapserver/kamapcvs/index.html
• http://www.flashearth.com/
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Resources
• Creative Commons (Roll your own ‘deeds’)
• http://creativecommons.org/
http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/
• http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/reticulum_rex/
• Virtual Machines / Appliances
• Console ~ http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
• MapSnack ~ http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory
• FOSS 2007 Conference (September 2427, 2007, Victoria, BC)
• http://www.foss4g2007.org/
• FOSS GIS downloads and installation guide
• http://geonetworkopensource.org/
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Relevant Quotes
• Linus Torvalds
• "Because the software is free, there is no pressure to
release it before it is really ready just to achieve some sales
target. Every version of Linux is declared to be finished
only when it is actually finished, which explains why it is
so solid. The other reason why free software is better is
because the personal reputation of the developer is
attached to every release."
• Bruce Perens (Business Week) on Open Source
• ...it taps into the true motivation of programmers in a way
that corporations often don't. Programmers are like
artists... They like to showcase their best stuff for their
peers. In open source, they can. But at most corporations,
their best work is hidden behind locked and guarded
doors.
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