If Steven adopted uDig and PostGIS for his shop, it would not do a thing for my bottom line. ![]() But I predict it will still be dominated by developers. Hopefully in the future it will have more features and stability, and the pool will be less narrow. UDig has enough features and stability to be useful right now to a narrow pool of developers creating custom applications with specific toolsets. Absent the firehose, it is hard to aggregate enough continuous effort to create desktop applications that include both the number of features and quality of finish necessary to entice the otherwise unmotivated “user”. It seems like all of the “user” success stories in the open source world (Firefox, Open Office, some of the “ desktop Linux” efforts) have at their core one common feature – a large and ongoing firehose of money. They can afford to be end user focused, because they have a paid pool of developers already in house. The Mozilla Foundation has a lot of employees, most of them working on development, and a deal with Google that nets them millions of dollars each year. The second problem is that Firefox is not a normal open source project.Developers will make the project stronger, add features, fix bugs, do all the things that end users want, but cannot do for themselves. What open source projects want to attract is not users – it is developers. For open source projects, more users just means somewhat more download bandwidth and slightly higher number of beginner questions on the mailing lists. The misunderstanding is reasonable, because for proprietary companies it is the goal – more users implies more licensing dollars. The first problem is the idea that garnering users is “the goal”. ![]() “Just be like Firefox.” There are a couple of problems with this idea. So, all we have to do is make something better than ArcGIS, but not so much better that it is not familiar to the existing user base, that works transparently with all their existing data and presumably their. THEN building in cool new features that keep people around.Not making user learn a new UI for interacting with the web. ![]() If you want people to switch you need to make the transition as painless as possible. His prescription is not for the faint of heart. He took a look at uDig (thanks!) but, unsurprisingly, finds that it ain’t ArcGIS quite yet. Steven Citron-Pousty has a good posting about why he cannot move his shop to an open source basis in the near term.
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