Before diving into the possibly sensitive area of Open Source (from users and vendors!) I thought it might be worthwhile reprising my previous article vis-à-vis Google Maps, which is already quite dated.  Google have now released a UK and USA geographic based local search, an API to their map servers (which you can embed within a website with a maximum of 50,000 hits PER DAY! - see www.astuntechnology.com/contact.html)  and also Google Earth (earth.google.com).  Take a look it is impressive!

What’s with Open Source…?

‘Open Source’ is most commonly associated with Operating Systems and the most well known is Linux.  Open Source is being backed and adopted by major IT companies around the globe such as IBM.  Even Microsoft now release some of their source code to the community and one example is the .NET Framework which has been ported by ‘the community’ to run on Linux  www.mono-project.com.  Another interesting Open Source project is sponsored by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) is LGOL-Net (www.lgolnet.org).  This is part of a Pathfinder project designed by Sunderland City Council and is now available to all other Local authorities for free.

Recently one of the major geospatial imaging companies, ER Mapper, became the primary sponsor of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Layer, an Open Source translator library which allows developers to access a multitude of geo-referenced image formats (www.remotesensing.org/gdal/)

‘No money in Open Source’

Also one of the major retail sites on the internet (eBay) has recently opened their doors to Open Source developers – see EBay Launches Site for Open Source Developers for more information.  The most important thing to point out here is that, Open Source is not just about providing things for free. There are many large global companies who have embraced Open Source, been highly profitable and where not commercially sensitive have fed their improvements and developments back to the community.

Google, uses Open Source products extensively on a large percentage of their tens of thousands of servers.  In fact on the web a high percentage of server operating systems, web server software, databases and scripting languages are Open Source – i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.  I’m sure that you will all have seen Google’s paper value rise since listing – I think it proves how Open Source can help a business be profitable!

Does it do what it says on the tin?

There are a lot of pros and cons when it comes to Open Source software but, in my view, these are irrelevant to an end user. As long as the solution does what it says on the tin and continues to be developed why should it matter? At present there are a lot of different initiatives looking at methods of collaboration and ways of sharing information.  In the UK for example the ODPM is promoting a lot of these for local government for example the use of mapping for the Government Connect Property Account.  This specifies GIS functionality such as what services are at this property or nearby?  This is not a complex task and when integrated into solutions can easily be achieved with freely available Open Source products. 

Tipping Point

If you take mapping I believe that we are at a ‘tipping point’ where Open Source software will become more and more common place.  No doubt many users are unaware that they are using software developed by the Open Source community, already included with commercial mapping packages.  As a user and developer of mapping software I have seen both source code and references included with software.  References are often to examples of WMS & WFS servers (many of the US government bodies use the Open Source web mapping engine MapServer which has these services built in) or code within samples.  Many developments regarding the reading of proprietary file formats were initiated in the Open Source community i.e. ShareLib for ESRI Shape and MITab for MapInfo TAB.  This is not just restricted to mapping engines, two of the most popular Open Source (i.e. web) databases – MySQL and Postgres - both have spatial capabilities.

Real Customer Benefits

One example of the benefits of Open Source is provided by DM Solutions in Canada.  This company is a major contributor to the development of the Open Source web mapping engine MapServer.  An opportunity arose with a Japanese mobile operator to provide a solution  for displaying maps on mobile phones via the internet.  Many commercial products already provide this functionality although there was one problem.  The mobile operator had a key requirement – they wanted the output to use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). DM Solutions were successful and have now provided all users of MapServer with SVG as an additional output format. As it happens MapServer can also output to most other image formats JPEG, PNG etc including Flash movies, Adobe PDF and GML.  This is all included in the box – well actually there isn’t a box but you get my drift…

Want to know more?

I’m not saying that open source is suitable for all projects but there are some powerful tools out there that may become more and more prominent in the coming years.  Next time I will look at some Open Source web mapping and database products and highlight some of their – dare I say - interoperable capabilities…