GIS FOSS 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
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Virtual Appliances
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Creative Commons Technological Perfect Storm?
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Examples Resources 2
Why Now? •
Web 2.0 raises the web GIS bar Grandma can use it now
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Open standards facilitate Service Oriented Architecture •
Web Feature Service (WFS), vector Web Map Service (WMS), raster
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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) 3
Maturity of FOSS •
Linux ~ University of Helsinki, 1991 Apache ~ NCSA, 1994
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PostgreSQL ~ Cal 1970’s
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PostGIS ~ Refractions Research, 2001 MapServer ~ University of Minnesota
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OpenLayers ~ OSGeo, 2006
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Virtualization •
Virtual Machines Highly portable (i.e. location and architecture) •
Faster installation
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Simplified replication of development and production environments
Virtual Appliance •
Bundled preconfigured application stacks •
Removes complexity from open source configuration
Example: •
MapSnack, June 2005 5
Creative Commons •
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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?
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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 8
Open Source Architecture
9 Source: Geonetwork-opensource.org
Twin Stacks
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TCO •
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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 11
Examples •
Web 2.0 GIS Examples: •
http://dev.openlayers.org/sandbox/emanuel/animatedZoom http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/editingtoolbar.html
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http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/openmnnd.html
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http://149.139.16.27/kamap/ http://enplan.com/mapserver/kamapcvs/index.html
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http://www.flashearth.com/ 12
Resources •
Creative Commons (Roll your own ‘deeds’) •
http://creativecommons.org/ http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/getcreative/
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Virtual Machines / Appliances •
Console ~ http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
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MapSnack ~ http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory
FOSS 2007 Conference (September 2427, 2007, Victoria, BC) •
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http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/reticulum_rex/
http://www.foss4g2007.org/
FOSS GIS downloads and installation guide •
http://geonetworkopensource.org/ 13
Relevant Quotes •
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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. 14