OSGeo Foundation Up In Arms Over ESRI LAS Lock-In Plans 35
Bismillah writes: The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is outraged over mapping giant ESRI's latest move which entails vendor lock-in for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data through its proprietary Optimised LAS format. ESRI is the dominant company in the geospatial data arena, with its ArcGIS mapping platform boasting with over a million users and 350,000 customers.
Their software cost an arm and both legs yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not surprised with this. GIS is almost a mono-culture that has been dominated by ESRI since forever. Their software costs in the thousands, yet crashes all the time and a lot of the included tools just don't work. Some parts of the interface have not changed since the 90s and they keep building on this dysfunctional foundation. Working with ArcGIS is a pain in the rear, yet for a lot of what ESRI software does, there is no alternative. Whenever I can I code my own stuff (using GDAL http://www.gdal.org/ [gdal.org]) and do all I can in QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/), but for a lot of tasks, you are stuck with ArcGIS and other ESRI tools. The market is more than ready for a new player that will make reliable software (whether commercial or open source, doesn't matter to most as they are used to pay through the roof for ESRI software anyway).
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Do ESRI actually generate the data? If so, what's the complaint?
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Do ESRI actually generate the data? If so, what's the complaint?
Nature generates the data. ESRI just hoard it.
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Re:Their software cost an arm and both legs yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work for a Government Agency that uses ArcGIS for that last 10 or so years. Personally I'm a Linux user and try to use and contribute to open source projects (although lately I haven't been able to). I also use QGIS but find it's not always what I want when it comes to the cartography part of GIS. The maps it produces never seem to be as nice as ArcGIS. Sorry got a little off topic here. What I'm saying is that even though I like and use open source, my bosses don't give a rats ass about it. If you even mention no licensing fees then they think its an inferior product. They have drank the kool-aid, so we pay tens of thousands for licensing of all kinds of products that have the same or better open source alternatives.
I believe this is also how many other agency view things. They don't care about open source. They just want someone to SELL them what they need.
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Sounds very similar to my own situation 10 years ago.
ArcGIS, while expensive, produced useful output, even to the point of other councils licencing our work.
Along comes a new IT Manager (my direct superior). Wanted to know why we were using BSD and not Windows for our internet-facing servers. Seriously, his question was "What's BSD?". He didn't trust anything without a gui, and was deeply suspicious of the Unix server running ArcGIS.
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ESRI is the Tomacco of GIS software. It's terrible, but they can't stop using it.
I was pulled onto a legacy application that was using ESRI, and after seeing what a disaster it was (the project was on the verge of losing funding) I trashed the whole thing and rebuilt it from the ground up using open source tools and libraries. What used to take weeks to months of hair pulling frustration from programmers now takes a couple minutes for a non-techie user.
Anecdotes are a dime a dozen though. I'm sure ArcGIS an
Re:Their software cost an arm and both legs yet... (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget training and consulting. That brings in quite a bit of revenue too. In my experience most ArcGIS installations aren't actually functional because they don't have people who can work the software. Even after training most installations don't have the personnel to dedicate to keep up with it; they maybe produce a report or two, and then the software sits on the shelf, then they need to send someone else to training.
In this environment a lot of people using ArcGIS might as well be using QGIS. If there were training and support for QGIS, this would build a user base which would attract developers. I think a lot more could be done in getting users to adopt web based mapping -- WMS and WMF -- too. The web is such moving platform that the kind of desktop based entrenchment ArcGIS enjoys is less significant.
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I get what you mean, but these parts of the interface are extremely clunky. But even worse than that, they migrated all their tools to an ActiveX interface that relies on Internet Explorer... and it really isn't all that stable, randomly stopping to work (you have to restart ArcGIS when it happens).
But even worse than that, it requires IE to be set at the default security level, which is not all that secure. Since I don't use IE, and want to minimize the risks to my lab machine, I usually set it to the maxi
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>>>Working with ArcGIS is a pain in the rear
Wholeheartedly agree. I am one of those poor souls who has to use this tool on a regular basis in my job and it is almost infuriating at every turn. Believe me the bugs that I encounter are sort of incredible at this day and age of software: for instance: there are specific addresses when fed to the ESRI geocoder service will actually crash the entire software! And their map rendering sucks donkey balls. The fact that there has been no challenges to their
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I'm not surprised with this. GIS is almost a mono-culture that has been dominated by ESRI since forever
The attitude is slowly changing though, with more and more open source tools becoming available. Like you said, gdal and qgis are adequate for most common use, but in the case of LiDAR there's PCL (point cloud library) offering a workable alternative for the traditional las/laz tools in some cases. On the server end there's PostGIS which is a really nice set of geospatial procedures for Postgresql which for a lot of uses is more than enough. There's geoserver, mapserver, and the various html/js frameworks l
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CJMTK - ESRI lock-in, mandated by Congress? (Score:3)
OK, this is hearsay, but I remember being told maybe 15 years ago that Congress placed language in the DoD budget mandating the use of a Commercial Mapping Toolkit, with language such that only ESRI's product would qualify. What I know is the CJMTK (Commercial Joint Mapping ToolKit) is an ESRI proprietary interface that is mandated for use in DoD systems.
Since then, it's been difficult to provide alternatives, particularly at the library/component level. Google Earth has gotten some traction, but not as an API but rather as a rendering engine.
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There's a difference, though, between a preference for COTS with vendor support, and a mandate for a specific COTS product. An Open Source product without anyone providing maintenance is a risk. An Open Source product where you can -compete- for maintenance is a real benefit. A COTS product where you pay whatever the vendor charges for maintenance is at least a predictable life-cycle cost, but that vendor has you by the short-hairs. I've seen products where the sustainment contract was a lot more than t
Light detection and ranging?? (Score:1)
Go fuck yourself.
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Although expressly used by many as an acronym of Light Detection And Ranging, the first usage of a term magically enshrines that usage, and no other, as the exclusive meaning of that series of letters for all time.
Or not.
Portmanteau, noun, plural portmanteaus, portmanteaux [pawrt-man-tohz, -toh, pohrt-, pawrt-man-tohz, -toh, pohrt-] (Show IPA)
Nothing new from the ESRI'alites... (Score:2)
This really isn't a new event; just as always with ESRI you will see them partner with business to define a need and then extend those functions to be new tools in their product only to see a short time later a ESRI specific toolset that is given away for free that does what the partner did but locking you into there platform. But in this they drive business away from said partner.
Having been on this side its hard on a small business to not see them for the predatory company they can be. So many of the "NEW
Not quite a monoculture (Score:2)