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In my last post I created a poll to get an idea of the extent of migration to open source GIS on the desktop. The results indicated that nearly 50% of the people using open source GIS were still using their proprietary software as well. You can view the results of the poll using the Polls Archive link below the current poll.
This leads one to wonder if it is the state of the open source software or other reasons that prevent a full migration. Take a look at the poll (right margin) and if you are a partial adopter, please vote or post a comment on what’s holding you back.
its over and over again the same thing: doing fine cartography on the desktop is just not yet feasible with lacking of label conflict detection, labeling options (labeling among a river for example), lack of manual label editing and specific placement etc
Blockers for full migration:
* easy, quick but satisfactory cartography including layout, header, map frame (intregardation of logos etc.), see also Karstens points above.
* Easy to use Vector (SHP) attribute table management, query & editing.
I have no doubt it is the state of open source software; and an interesting conflict that occurs when you drum up funding.
It is difficult to ask people to pay for functionality they already enjoy with a proprietary solution.
To take labelling as an example: for the geotools project Andrea just took 3 days of his holiday to vastly improve the labelling support for GeoServer and uDig. At any point in the last four years he could of been hired to perform these steps.
Now would you like to pay to improve this functionality to exactly meet your needs? Or are you “waiting” for it to catch up to your expectations.
A unified framework for all kinds of gp-operations with a visual workflow modelling, like in erdas and esri products would nice to. ( you can combine ogr/gdal, grass, numpy, … etc. in python, but it isn’t a as easy as in the proprietary frameworks )
Also don’t forget that a lot of people don’t like change, if i would’t propose to my coworkers to use different a product then what are using now, it would have to be better or easier to use. The price doesn’t matter they don’t have pay it.
That’s why geoserver is getting so popular, it’s easier to use and install then most proprietary alternatives. ( At least in my agency thats the reason we are using it, we have piles of money, so price is less important)
Nothing is holding me back – it’s been years since I used a proprietary GIS program.