GIS Software Comparison on Wikipedia

November 13th, 2006 · 12 Comments · GIS

A reader who probably enjoys my bashing of Wikipedia sent me an interesting take on the GIS software packages. I’m guessing the person who created the table didn’t have much time to research the system requirements of all the different GIS software packages. Mapserver does run on Windows (I wouldn’t say it “runs” on the web, but then again I’m an ESRI apologist I guess) and “ESRI” does run on GNU/Linux (sorta as I believe only RHEL is supported) and one could say that ArcWeb runs on “the Web”. Don’t get me wrong, the task is very hard, but if you don’t know then don’t put “no” down. Someone care to bail this page out for the sake of GIS Day? Maybe Wikipedia User:Redlands can correct “ESRI”.

Tags:

12 responses so far ↓

1 James Fee // Nov 13, 2006 at 6:35 pm

Looks like some people are already making changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_GIS_software
2 Jason Birch // Nov 13, 2006 at 7:32 pm

Wow.

I think it’s a bit too generic. To say that ESRI runs on unix/linux is technically accurate but… Autodesk and MapInfo (at least) also need to be split out. These rows should be applications, not companies.

I’d fix it, but I’m not feeling too collaborative right now

Jason
3 James Fee // Nov 13, 2006 at 7:35 pm

Yea me too Jason. I’m not a Wiki kinda guy.

That said this list could be quite long if you break out all the ESRI/Autodesk/Intergraph/MapInfo and other large companies products. I mean, technically ArcView worked on MacOS 8.
4 Jason Birch // Nov 13, 2006 at 7:57 pm

I think that if they at least broke out these large entities into “desktop” and “server” it would be more accurage.

Maybe in a couple years virtualisation will make operating systems redundant (cough). I’m glad to see that cross-platfor support is getting more important though. I’m considering OS-X or Ubunto for my long-overdue home PC upgrade. The licensing restrictions around Vista for home use seem to be way too draconian for my usage profile. We just got a MacBook at work for testing accessibility, and I kinda like it. I spent an hour with my boss just playing around turning on and off services like Apache, sshd, etc

In the meantime, I guess we could argue that if you’re talking about Workstation, Arc/Info is still one of the most cross-platform apps out there
5 James Fee // Nov 13, 2006 at 8:07 pm

re: Arc/Info Workstation…

I mean where can you still get support for HP-UX (just got rid of the old HP-UX server last year ), True-64, AIX, and Solaris. I’m still sad that 9.1 dropped support for SGI IRIX.
6 WikiUser // Nov 14, 2006 at 9:10 am

Damn James, you posted this and now the table is looking so much better. You may not like Wikipedia, but you are making it better whether you not you want to.
7 Doug // Nov 14, 2006 at 10:18 am

I appreciate the idea, but it really is a worthless chart because it is too general and doesn’t really help you answer the qestion of: I have a GIS problem I want to solve, what platforms can I solve it on?

It needs to be broken out by product, for example desktop GUI GIS, desktop object programming, server data management, server objects, web viewing, web editing, etc. The OS needs to be differentiated between OS and potential GUIs (linux and “unix” have multiple GUIs that may or may not be supported, and we should seperate out OS X from OS 9 for Apple).

For example by what definition does ESRI as a company not support the web? Ever heard of ArcIMS? Ever heard of ArcGIS Server? That Arc GIS explorer thingy? How does Oracle spatial support the web abd Arc SDE not support the web?

What does it mean to support “unix”? How does ESRI not support unix?

Seeing how messed up some of these things is a bit discouraging. No I have no intention of cleaning Wikipedia’s garbage.
8 capone // Nov 14, 2006 at 10:53 am

That is OK Doug, ESRI really shouldn’t modify the article. The correct plan of action would be to not the problems in the discussion page.

I agree though, the chart is trying to simplify a large mess.
9 Doug // Nov 14, 2006 at 11:11 am

I don’t think that ESRI or any other vendor should modify the article either. ESRI could say “we support HP/UX, nobody else does!” and hide whatever asterixs they want.

I don’t like Wikipedia. It has a too much of a tendency to bend over backwards by trying to give both sides of an argument. Wikipedia is either useful (for things that involve math) or used as an Orwellian/marketing tool by its authors. It has a tendency to mix historical fact with interpretation. It is supposed to have neutral community created content but some community members have an obvious bias (being paid by the company they write about).

The page could be made useful. It really needs to approach GIS from the position of: GUI user, script (i.e. python geoprocessing) user, custom application developer, RDBMS ad DBA, Web browsing, web editing, web analysis, GeoBrowser (GE, AGX) user. Then you need to look at each of these users and see which platforms/platform GUIs are supported.
10 zé // Feb 14, 2008 at 6:12 pm

Would you guys be so kind as to provide me with some info about the comparison of popular opensource/freeware gis software against “mainstream” payable programs? thx:)
11 mentaer // Feb 14, 2008 at 11:10 pm

if you just push me hard enough I can publish a quite nice table on FOSS desktop GIS that I have setup with some help from the project. But it requires some reworking and even more, I need a place/server for hosting it -without that issue that everybody can write, i.e. “pimps” his entry. (although I could use a Sourceforge account to do that)
For the current version you can have look here:
http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~sstein/docs/
(note: the tables are too large for using a wiki)
What is still missing too, is a functional comparison (2nd table) to proprietary Desktop GIS
12 Jorge Antunes // Apr 16, 2008 at 3:54 am

And I’ll add…. GRASS runs on Windows and… everything runs everywhere if you set it up on VMWARE (or other virtualization software).