Sure it makes sense… when you have major development efforts (like 64bit for COM) that you have to fund.. you start milking all of those people who made you what you are for as much as you can!
Well, it is definitely happening, but I’ve been told that we *should* have known about this some time ago (we certainly didn’t). ESRI blame that communications lapse on CHEST, who administer the educational licensing in the UK. They are working to provide us with the commercial licenses at the same cost we pay for the educational licenses, but while that will get around the current emergency, it still leaves us at their mercy if they change their mind.
ESRI exec: This economy sucks. See if there’s some more international money we can extract.
ESRI: Archaeogeek, you owe us more $$
Archaeogeek: *on blog* This is crazy! We are essentially academic, on a very finite budget, and we can’t afford the commercial licenses. Time to migrate 100% to open source. Money saved on licensing can be spent on training.
GIS Community: Boo, ESRI. Not cool.
ESRI: Uh, well we aren’t really going to raise licensing fees. *note to self: next time make sure we raise rates on an agency that doesn’t blog*
Cellulose; “With the dollar being as weak as is, shouldn’t international customers be getting a price break?”
Yeah, beats me. We typically pay the same price in Her Majesty’s Royal Pounds that you guys pay in Dollars (GBP 1 roughly = USD 2). I mean, surely we’ve paid back all those tea taxes by now?
Sorry to hear about your situation. I think what I would find annoying is not just the change in price but the short notice. A bitter pill indeed.
However, casting myself in the rare position of defending ESRI (in the matter of what deserves an “educational” discount and not the capricious manner of their change of heart) I have to say that other GIS vendors also will usually make a distinction between degree-granting institutions and other educational institutions when it comes to special academic discounts or free academic donations. Manifold, for example, gives away at no charge unlimited free licenses to degree-granting K-12 schools, 2 year and four year colleges but does not in general make donations to other “educational” establishments.
There have been some departures from the above, for example free license donations to museums or to archaeological institutes which are clearly and on a regular basis doing significant teaching even if not granting degrees. But donations have not ever been made, to my knowledge, to a commercial enterprise even if it is a highly admirable one like yours appears to be.
So, our move to open source gets a boost today, from an unexpected quarter. In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an educational charity we are no longer allowed to have an educational discount
Well, perhaps you don’t have to swallow a second bitter pill by going open source and thus denying yourself the many virtues of truly elite, full-featured, professionally supported and perfectly integrated commercial GIS software.
What were you paying for your ESRI licenses? Could it be that a commercial GIS alternative exists such that even if you buy at regular price it would be within reasonable range of what you were spending for ESRI, even with your discounts? Could it be an alternative exists that you would far prefer to the ESRI tools you were using?
I would not be so quick to jump over the open source cliff with your budget streaming in tatters behind you – after all, thinly-funded organizations have to be especially careful about retaining economic efficiency, and usually it is the case that efficiency means sticking to your knitting (doing archaeology, for example) and not committing everyone to a second career as software developers, spending a lot of staff time making your own shoes, so to speak, when first rate shoes can be acquired off the shelf inexpensively.
Is your firm a commercial firm? Do you have any association with a degree-granting institution that would allow you to colorably “ride” upon an academic license grant made to that degree-granting institution?
@Dimitri- moving over to open source has been a goal of the company for a couple of years now as part of a general move over to being more “open”. Far from there being any “jumping off cliffs with our budget streaming in tatters behind us”, this has been a rational and strategic decision.
Staying with any kind of commercial software package will leave us in much the same position that we are now in, which is where the software vendor is in control, and can choose to take the software away from us whenever they like. This is not a position we wish to find ourselves in.
We have been evaluating a number of open source GIS packages for a few months now, and know that at least three of them will do what we need them to do. Money that we save from buying commercial packages can be ploughed into helping the development effort. Best of all, we will be in control of the packages we use.
Could you tell us what your cost of GIS per seat will be, truly internalizing all costs, in the strategy you are undertaking? I trust you have done this analysis and have some hard figures you can report.
I’d be curious to see whether it is more or less than the $125 to $250 per seat which is the going rate for companies like yours for truly elite, off-the-shelf GIS that exceeds the ArcGIS suite. If it is more, why would you be willing to spend more?
moving over to open source has been a goal of the company for a couple of years now as part of a general move over to being more “open”.
Could it be that your company’s years-long goal in moving over to open source finally convinced ESRI it was stupid to continue subsidizing you, since you planned to dump them anyway?
No doubt ESRI expect that when they subsidize someone by giving them free product or greatly discounted product that the beneficiary of their largesse will at least respect the value of what they have been given. Surely, at a minimum, ESRI expect that such beneficiaries will not be muttering that dumping ESRI’s commercial software in favor of open source is both strategic and rational.
Why should a vendor who has provided greatly discounted software to you continue doing so if for years now you have thought so little of their software and so little of the ultimate value that it brings to your organization that you feel you can efficiently replace it by cobbling together some open source code? Should they not redirect their philanthropy to someone who really needs it, who, perhaps, lacks the godlike capacity to cheaply and effectively replace ArcGIS with open source?
If that is what happened, why shouldn’t ESRI say, in effect, “Well, we supported these folks and they have come to the conclusion they know better how to make their own shoes using open source than using the shoes we so generously gave them…. time for us to move on and let these folks experience for themselves whether the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence.”
Onward: I must respectfully disagree with:
Staying with any kind of commercial software package will leave us in much the same position that we are now in, which is where the software vendor is in control, and can choose to take the software away from us whenever they like.
That’s just plain weird. No one in their right minds would license commercial software from a vendor who “can choose to take the software away… whenever they like” so I’m surprised you would give that as a reason not to utilize commercial software.
The commercial norm is to provide a perpetual license to use the software, with the Microsoft EULA being a classic example. Microsoft can no more wake up one morning and decide to take that software away from you any more than BMW can sell you a car paid in full and then some day decide to take that car away from you.
Money that we save from buying commercial packages can be ploughed into helping the development effort.
The key question is whether what you save by not buying off the shelf in a sensible way will be more than what you spend on your development effort, also run sensibly. That’s the bit people usually get wrong.
If you are sure you can get it right you should drop out of archaeology and go into the software business yourself. You’d make billions.
I mean that very seriously because no one likes to spend money they don’t have to. The going rate right now for elite, 64-bit GIS for organizations like yours that blows the doors off the ArcGIS suite is $125 to $250 a seat. If you know how to do better than that to such a significant degree that you are willing to roll the dice with the resources of a thinly-funded archaeology practise to launch a development effort, well, then you truly do have the opportunity to make billions because there are very, very many other people around the world who want to pay you for those same benefits.
Think about it… whatever you are being paid in your current job to achieve that economic ju jitsu for your current employer and current user base… if what you say is really economically viable, well, your employer and your users aren’t the only ones who want that. A lot of other people do too, and, unlike you they don’t know how to accomplish that without ending up spending way more than $125 to $250 a seat.
Best of all, we will be in control of the packages we use.
That’s only true if you do all of the development on all of them. In real life, you will be responsible for everything but in control of very little.
In real life, the packages you use will be the result of a variety of decision-making processes within the communities that develop them. Those communities tend to have different priorities and the packages they emit almost always evolve at very different rates in different directions.
For all that, there are plenty of highly useful and interesting open source packages (PostgreSQL/PostGIS to name just one) – but don’t kid yourself that “control” has anything more to do with them than would be the case with a sensible commercial package.
Open source can be very good if you seek intrinsic variety and ferment as a stimulus to your creativity, but it is a real challenge to manage in production environments. In real life you won’t be in control of anything except figuring out how to keep a lot of code written by other people integrated and functional.
But you still will have total responsibility to maintain what will end up being a fully custom deployment within your organization, a deployment that depends upon code written by other people, code which you will never have the time and expertise to sufficiently master at the source code level to be free of the control those other people have.
By the way, I’m not saying that when other people have control over the products you use it is a bad situation. It can either be very good or it can be very bad. The usual case is that what makes it very good is when the people having control over those products also have responsibility to you to use that control in sensible ways for your benefit.
If you really think you have a workable solution in open source, go for it. Just don’t kid yourself that the reasons you gave are anything but assuming your conclusion.
Interesting alternative view on the case there, Dmitri. Unfortunately you have some basic facts wrong. ESRI have changed the entirety of their educational license, affecting every educational charity presumably in the world, not just one company. They haven’t just tightened up who qualifies for a license, but have put an embargo on people from a whole range of countries from so much as looking at the installation disks. If you don’t believe me, go and read the new license. We just happen to have put some planning in place before this so it’s not as much of a problem as it is for some other archaeological units that we know that were planning to put all of their eggs in the esri basket and are now in a really difficult position.
You’ll understand that I’m not prepared to give company figures over to a complete stranger on a blog- particularly as it would appear that you have some other commercial product in mind (can’t imagine what that might be…).
I don’t have time to rebut all of the rest of your points, except to say that I, my company, and practically everyone else who has corresponded with me over this on this blog or my own appears to disagree with you. Do you seriously think you are going to sell more of your own product by doing down the efforts that are going into open source development and questioning the motivation, planning and general business acumen of potential customers?
I apologize for not being familiar with the details of ESRI’s new licensing – This “defending ESRI” stuff is so new to me I appreciate you have pointed me in the right direction.
Nonetheless, we all know organizations sometimes utilize global policies as “air cover” for specific decisions that could go either way based upon the judgments of local managers. ESRI has choices as to how they will implement a new policy and what exceptions they may elect to make.
I’m simply pointing out that if you had been planning for two years to dump ESRI for open source perhaps your message got through to them and that it was a factor in their decision to end their donations to you in a way that did not make an exception for you under the new policy. But that’s as far as I will go to defend them.
By the way, I suppose it goes without saying that no one who has benefited from an exception to the new policy will be so indiscrete as to advertise that exception on this or any other forum?
I don’t have time to rebut all of the rest of your points, except to say that I, my company, and practically everyone else who has corresponded with me over this on this blog or my own appears to disagree with you.
You have me there. If all your friends agree with you there obviously is no need to explain yourself by answering any questions.
But at least you are making philosophical progress – instead of you assuming your own conclusion, you go one better: you allow your friends to assume your conclusion for you.
You’ll understand that I’m not prepared to give company figures over to a complete stranger on a blog
Oh, no worries about privacy… it will be just between you and me and the billions of people who will be able to Google this archive forever into the future.
Seriously, though, I didn’t ask about any state secrets. I asked what you thought your cost per seat would be, fully internalized, for GIS using the open source strategy you have chosen. I didn’t even ask what your particular open source strategy was. My question is one any responsible IT person asks before they launch into any development project or big deployment, be it commercial products or open source.
Laying out your business case for rationality would be a great help to open source advocates who would also like to convince their organizations of the true business value of open source. Being secretive about your findings in such broad outline somehow does not seem right for someone who wants to be “open.”
Do you seriously think you are going to sell more of your own product by doing down the efforts that are going into open source development and questioning the motivation, planning and general business acumen of potential customers?
Ah, now you are cheating by launching into an ad hominem attack. A salient characteristic of such attacks is that instead of discussing the substance of what someone has asked, you instead attack their motivations. For example, what I happen to do for a living in my business life and whether I think I will sell more or less has no effect whatsoever on what your costs per seat for GIS will be as a result of the development effort you intend to launch.
You’ve also cheated a bit in the social compact folks have in these blogs in that they try not to discourage participation by industry players by dragging their industry roles into it. It’s like living in Westwood or Hollywood – part of the social compact for locals is that when some actor, well known or not, walks into your local grocery you act cool about it so he can participate in the community like everyone else.
Until you raised the matter most people viewing this thread would have had no idea I had any commercial interests in GIS in my business life. They’d think I was just another particularly astute guy doing his civic duty to help a worthy “educational charity” become aware of the economic risks of what just might be an overly optimistic and not exactly rational strategy.
I also take exception to your implication that by asking reasonable questions about your planned open source development project I am somehow “doing down” open source development. If you have faith in open source you have no problem with me asking meticulous questions about justifying the use of open source in a particular project. If you get twitchy when someone questions your strategy, you are not showing faith in it.
The open source advocates I work with are a pragmatic, successful bunch who reach for open source because it works well for them. They are not at all shy about stating, rather forcefully and in a crystal clear manner, exactly why using open source makes sense for them. They do not assume their conclusions, they know “control” has little if anything to do with the benefits they get and they can quote to the dollar the costs of their major deployments.
Applying those same standards in a modest question or two posed to you about a specific case is not denigrating open source, in contrast it is simply not being willing to settle for vague assurances.
As for teasing your motivation, planning and general business acumen, well, OK, I apologize for that. But you have to understand I’m only human so when you write really off-the-wall stuff like that paranoid bit about commercial licensing I can only resist the impulse to be arch for so long. Sorry about that.
Uh, Dmitri, maybe Archaeogeek simply doesn’t have the spare time/energy to engage in the traditional open-source vs. proprietary software debate with the same enthusiasm/frequency that you do. Or indeed the same volume.
If I was worried about replacing my entire software platform in a matter of weeks, I’d probably prioritise that task above contributing yet more KBs to the world’s growing mountains of blogobytes.
Happily, you and I obviously have a little more time on our hands!
I just finally had to say something. I find Dmitri’s comments always helpful. I am a Manifold user (full disclosure) but I do try to keep an open mind. My company uses ESRI products in our engineering group because we can afford it, and the installed user base in the professional world demands it. So I would never recommend they stop as there are just too many add-ons and stuff available that they need that they can’t easily get with Manifold. And I am told that ESRI does some things better than Manifold in its current version.
So with this open mind (seems to me anyway) I wonder sometimes why others don’t try to see the logic in the persuasive arguments Dmitri poses. Most bloggers can’t refute his cogent and well stated reasons for considering Manifold as one of their GIS tools. Indeed, the 64-bit capability of Manifold would seem to me to be a deal breaker with ESRI products, and open the door for anyone who works with massive projects (most professionals) to at least include Manifold on their computers.
As far as Archaeogeek’s situation, a cost of $600 for a fully-loaded-including-everything-copy of Manifold would seem to me irresistible compared to open-source. What’s the risk? Use them all, open-source, Manifold, whatever, let the work sort out the winner.
I am with J. Forgive me if that will sound rude but Archaeogeek has found the time to write a rather lengthy blog post which was the entire reason for this thread, then write another blog post on the same topic, plus answer comments to both these blog posts. He certainly has the time.
Interesting post. I have no particular axe to grind here re. ESRI/Manifold/whatever. But I can’t help feeling that if I were trying to provide a sustainable GIS IT infrastructure for a charitable organisation on a tiny (and probably fluctuating) budget, I might also be inclined to conclude that, having been forced to confront the possibility of a painful transition away from ESRI because of arbitrarily imposed licencing issues, I would probably prefer to go through that pain just once by shifting to an open FOSS platform, rather than risk the same thing happening again further down the line by adopting another proprietary solution.
But as you rightly say, it’s horses for courses and it depends on what your organisation’s requirements are. I have an expensive copy of MS Office taking up disk space on my PC which does all kinds of fancy things that I never need to do. I also have a free copy of OpenOffice that I use every day because it does everything I need. I’ve also worked on enterprise J2EE systems built entirely on – and with – FOSS tools, and others built using expensive proprietary tools, and frankly I have my doubts whether the additional costs brought any significant benefits whatsoever (apart from the safety net of having a big corporation to complain to when things go wrong), despite Dimitri’s convictions about the likely quality of proprietary vs open-source solutions in the GIS arena.
Of course, I’m no expert in GIS, which is why I enjoy dropping in to blogs like this and picking up ideas from you guys. But with the pace of developments in FOSS for GIS, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that many people might choose to adopt it as their preferred platform, if they believe it will deliver what they want at a price they can afford, without leaving them open to licencing problems later on.
Either way, these are interesting times for FOSS in GIS and elsewhere, and it’s going to be fun watching how the mix-and-match interfaces between the different approaches develop. Might not be quite so much fun trying to implement those interfaces, of course…!
Well, it has certainly been an interesting debate, which I am going to bow out of right now, because it’s entirely correct that I don’t have the time or the enthusiasm to engage in the continuing arguments about it.
Last couple of points: Dmitri, if you really think that one small UK company’s decision to start evaluating open source alternatives to products as part of an ethical decision to be more open in what we do would cause ESRI to change their entire educational license, affecting many organisations world wide, then to be honest, I’m flattered that you might think we have that much influence.
Secondly, as for making exceptions to the policy, we have colleagues in other units who have made no such decision, and in fact were going to move entirely over to ESRI who now find themselves in a very difficult position. I also don’t understand how you can cast yourself as the defender of ESRI in this case when you state clearly that you’re not familiar with the license.
As for claiming that all the people who have commented are “friends”- that’s a little lame, as in the main I have exactly the same prior relationship with them as I do with you- ie none. They have offered their opinion exactly as you have.
As far as I’m concerned, decisions about going open source sh0uld be about control over what you do, and the philosophy of it, and not just about cost. Otherwise people continue to misunderstand the difference between something that is free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
And finally, is it paranoia when it actually happens? ESRI did this to us, and a lot of other people. In what sense am I being paranoid about that?
Since I don’t want to end on a bad note- Dmitri- I think you and I are always going to have different opinions about this, and that’s good. If we ever end up at the same conference together then perhaps we can get together over beer and continue the debate
I don’t know about the UK, but here in the U.S. there are numerous ways to apply for funding through grants for non-profit use to purchase software. It seems that Archaeogeek, may fall into the non-profit category and thus be eligible to buy licenses through those grants.
Again, I am sorry if I will sound rude, but this is one more illustration that some of us can find the time to write about various tangential issues, but will dutifully refuse to discuss the main points. What is that control over what you do that you are talking about? What are those disaster scenarios that you will prevent by using open source tools instead of commercial closed source tools and how exactly you will prevent them? One gets a feeling that this part of your “Licensing Woes” (to use the title of this thread) is nothing more than an overly emotional response to being let down by ESRI.
Not intending to pile on, but… some clarifications:
one small UK company’s decision [...] would cause ESRI to change their entire educational license
I’m not suggesting your company changed ESRI’s entire licensing. I’m only asking if once ESRI decided to change their licensing that perhaps it was your avowed march to open source that convinced them not to grant you an exception or to cut you any slack.
As for claiming that all the people who have commented are “friends”- that’s a little lame, as in the main I have exactly the same prior relationship with them as I do with you- ie none. They have offered their opinion exactly as you have.
Not exactly, since I am posting my comments in a public blog where everyone can debate the merits of what I write. That forces me to provide the logic behind what I claim and prevents me from making logical errors, like assuming my own conclusion, that will be immediately criticized by astute observers.
Claiming your viewpoint is correct because all of your private correspondents agree with you is not advancing a logical argument. It is a different form of agreeing with yourself.
As far as I’m concerned, decisions about going open source sh0uld be about control over what you do, and the philosophy of it, and not just about cost. Otherwise people continue to misunderstand the difference between something that is free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
If you are spending other people’s money it is all about cost and the specific, hard-nosed performance of the tools you choose, matters such as risk management (what “control” is usually about) being a normal and ordinary part of the cost reckoning. That is normally what people mean by “rational and strategic” as in the justification you gave for your organization’s careful interest in open source for two years.
I welcome you to reality if you agree that open source is not remotely free of cost, but I chide you for enmeshing that realization in the pretzel logic of suggesting that such cost should not be primary because you have some higher political or philosophical objective in mind, in particular if you are dragging in some undefined evasive use of the word “free” to justify whatever you like for such objectives.
Do you tell your financiers that you intend to base your IT strategy as regards GIS not on the basis of choosing financially and technically effective tools (the “cost” bit) but instead upon your political or philosophical musings? Do you tell them this is what you mean when you say your choice is “rational and strategic”?
Does your sense of “openness” extend to full disclosure and willingness to allow full examination of your politics and philosophy, so the people who support your organization can decide whether they want to finance your philosophical musings? Perhaps your sponsors or your clients might think their philanthropy for archaeology might go much further if they invested in an organization which felt it important to be cost-efficient and productivity-enhanced through a choice of GIS strategy that did not disdain such factors in favor of nebulous philosophy.
Keep in mind that in part this thread was started by you crying “poor” over the unfortunate misery of your underfunded organization at the hands of ESRI, and the need to husband resources to continue your noble mission. If that’s the case, you have a duty to keep your political and philosophical yearnings in check and not be so disdainful of cost.
And finally, is it paranoia when it actually happens? ESRI did this to us, and a lot of other people. In what sense am I being paranoid about that?
I was responding to the utterly unreal reason you gave for not being interested in using commercial products:
Staying with any kind of commercial software package will leave us in much the same position that we are now in, which is where the software vendor is in control, and can choose to take the software away from us whenever they like.
For the reasons I set forth in my earlier reply, the above has no basis in the software licenses generally used by commercial vendors, hence my comment about paranoia.
Now, I can’t imagine anyone agreeing to a deal with such unbelievably capricious provisions, but if you actually agreed to such a deal with ESRI you have no one but yourself to blame. If you are indeed responsible for the GIS needs of an organization with 300 people it was crazy of you to base the GIS infrastructure of that organization on a deal which could go away without warning if the software vendor “can choose to take the software away [...] whenever they like.”
I have to say that your comment about the “take the software away from us” bit leads me to the uncharitable thought that you haven’t bothered to carefully survey the commercial alternatives to ESRI or to open source. If you had, you would have realized that choosing a commercial alternative need not have anything to do with such capricious licensing.
I have no ill will against you personally. I do feel an obligation to argue against misguided use of software for two reasons: first, because I believe in open source and strong arguments help the cause and second, because I don’t like seeing poor organizations get their budgets eviscerated by any inappropriate use of software, be it commercial or open source.
Sure it makes sense… when you have major development efforts (like 64bit for COM) that you have to fund.. you start milking all of those people who made you what you are for as much as you can!
BOHICA!!
D~
Hopefully, ESRI will label this a “communication” error and not change the licensing. This is not the kind of press you want.
Well, it is definitely happening, but I’ve been told that we *should* have known about this some time ago (we certainly didn’t). ESRI blame that communications lapse on CHEST, who administer the educational licensing in the UK. They are working to provide us with the commercial licenses at the same cost we pay for the educational licenses, but while that will get around the current emergency, it still leaves us at their mercy if they change their mind.
ESRI exec: This economy sucks. See if there’s some more international money we can extract.
ESRI: Archaeogeek, you owe us more $$
Archaeogeek: *on blog* This is crazy! We are essentially academic, on a very finite budget, and we can’t afford the commercial licenses. Time to migrate 100% to open source. Money saved on licensing can be spent on training.
GIS Community: Boo, ESRI. Not cool.
ESRI: Uh, well we aren’t really going to raise licensing fees. *note to self: next time make sure we raise rates on an agency that doesn’t blog*
With the dollar being as weak as is, shouldn’t international customers be getting a price break?
Cellulose; “With the dollar being as weak as is, shouldn’t international customers be getting a price break?”
Yeah, beats me. We typically pay the same price in Her Majesty’s Royal Pounds that you guys pay in Dollars (GBP 1 roughly = USD 2). I mean, surely we’ve paid back all those tea taxes by now?
Archaeogeek,
Sorry to hear about your situation. I think what I would find annoying is not just the change in price but the short notice. A bitter pill indeed.
However, casting myself in the rare position of defending ESRI (in the matter of what deserves an “educational” discount and not the capricious manner of their change of heart) I have to say that other GIS vendors also will usually make a distinction between degree-granting institutions and other educational institutions when it comes to special academic discounts or free academic donations. Manifold, for example, gives away at no charge unlimited free licenses to degree-granting K-12 schools, 2 year and four year colleges but does not in general make donations to other “educational” establishments.
There have been some departures from the above, for example free license donations to museums or to archaeological institutes which are clearly and on a regular basis doing significant teaching even if not granting degrees. But donations have not ever been made, to my knowledge, to a commercial enterprise even if it is a highly admirable one like yours appears to be.
Well, perhaps you don’t have to swallow a second bitter pill by going open source and thus denying yourself the many virtues of truly elite, full-featured, professionally supported and perfectly integrated commercial GIS software.
What were you paying for your ESRI licenses? Could it be that a commercial GIS alternative exists such that even if you buy at regular price it would be within reasonable range of what you were spending for ESRI, even with your discounts? Could it be an alternative exists that you would far prefer to the ESRI tools you were using?
I would not be so quick to jump over the open source cliff with your budget streaming in tatters behind you – after all, thinly-funded organizations have to be especially careful about retaining economic efficiency, and usually it is the case that efficiency means sticking to your knitting (doing archaeology, for example) and not committing everyone to a second career as software developers, spending a lot of staff time making your own shoes, so to speak, when first rate shoes can be acquired off the shelf inexpensively.
Is your firm a commercial firm? Do you have any association with a degree-granting institution that would allow you to colorably “ride” upon an academic license grant made to that degree-granting institution?
@Dimitri- moving over to open source has been a goal of the company for a couple of years now as part of a general move over to being more “open”. Far from there being any “jumping off cliffs with our budget streaming in tatters behind us”, this has been a rational and strategic decision.
Staying with any kind of commercial software package will leave us in much the same position that we are now in, which is where the software vendor is in control, and can choose to take the software away from us whenever they like. This is not a position we wish to find ourselves in.
We have been evaluating a number of open source GIS packages for a few months now, and know that at least three of them will do what we need them to do. Money that we save from buying commercial packages can be ploughed into helping the development effort. Best of all, we will be in control of the packages we use.
Archaeogeek,
Could you tell us what your cost of GIS per seat will be, truly internalizing all costs, in the strategy you are undertaking? I trust you have done this analysis and have some hard figures you can report.
I’d be curious to see whether it is more or less than the $125 to $250 per seat which is the going rate for companies like yours for truly elite, off-the-shelf GIS that exceeds the ArcGIS suite. If it is more, why would you be willing to spend more?
Could it be that your company’s years-long goal in moving over to open source finally convinced ESRI it was stupid to continue subsidizing you, since you planned to dump them anyway?
No doubt ESRI expect that when they subsidize someone by giving them free product or greatly discounted product that the beneficiary of their largesse will at least respect the value of what they have been given. Surely, at a minimum, ESRI expect that such beneficiaries will not be muttering that dumping ESRI’s commercial software in favor of open source is both strategic and rational.
Why should a vendor who has provided greatly discounted software to you continue doing so if for years now you have thought so little of their software and so little of the ultimate value that it brings to your organization that you feel you can efficiently replace it by cobbling together some open source code? Should they not redirect their philanthropy to someone who really needs it, who, perhaps, lacks the godlike capacity to cheaply and effectively replace ArcGIS with open source?
If that is what happened, why shouldn’t ESRI say, in effect, “Well, we supported these folks and they have come to the conclusion they know better how to make their own shoes using open source than using the shoes we so generously gave them…. time for us to move on and let these folks experience for themselves whether the grass is really greener on the other side of the fence.”
Onward: I must respectfully disagree with:
That’s just plain weird. No one in their right minds would license commercial software from a vendor who “can choose to take the software away… whenever they like” so I’m surprised you would give that as a reason not to utilize commercial software.
The commercial norm is to provide a perpetual license to use the software, with the Microsoft EULA being a classic example. Microsoft can no more wake up one morning and decide to take that software away from you any more than BMW can sell you a car paid in full and then some day decide to take that car away from you.
The key question is whether what you save by not buying off the shelf in a sensible way will be more than what you spend on your development effort, also run sensibly. That’s the bit people usually get wrong.
If you are sure you can get it right you should drop out of archaeology and go into the software business yourself. You’d make billions.
I mean that very seriously because no one likes to spend money they don’t have to. The going rate right now for elite, 64-bit GIS for organizations like yours that blows the doors off the ArcGIS suite is $125 to $250 a seat. If you know how to do better than that to such a significant degree that you are willing to roll the dice with the resources of a thinly-funded archaeology practise to launch a development effort, well, then you truly do have the opportunity to make billions because there are very, very many other people around the world who want to pay you for those same benefits.
Think about it… whatever you are being paid in your current job to achieve that economic ju jitsu for your current employer and current user base… if what you say is really economically viable, well, your employer and your users aren’t the only ones who want that. A lot of other people do too, and, unlike you they don’t know how to accomplish that without ending up spending way more than $125 to $250 a seat.
That’s only true if you do all of the development on all of them. In real life, you will be responsible for everything but in control of very little.
In real life, the packages you use will be the result of a variety of decision-making processes within the communities that develop them. Those communities tend to have different priorities and the packages they emit almost always evolve at very different rates in different directions.
For all that, there are plenty of highly useful and interesting open source packages (PostgreSQL/PostGIS to name just one) – but don’t kid yourself that “control” has anything more to do with them than would be the case with a sensible commercial package.
Open source can be very good if you seek intrinsic variety and ferment as a stimulus to your creativity, but it is a real challenge to manage in production environments. In real life you won’t be in control of anything except figuring out how to keep a lot of code written by other people integrated and functional.
But you still will have total responsibility to maintain what will end up being a fully custom deployment within your organization, a deployment that depends upon code written by other people, code which you will never have the time and expertise to sufficiently master at the source code level to be free of the control those other people have.
By the way, I’m not saying that when other people have control over the products you use it is a bad situation. It can either be very good or it can be very bad. The usual case is that what makes it very good is when the people having control over those products also have responsibility to you to use that control in sensible ways for your benefit.
If you really think you have a workable solution in open source, go for it. Just don’t kid yourself that the reasons you gave are anything but assuming your conclusion.
Interesting alternative view on the case there, Dmitri. Unfortunately you have some basic facts wrong. ESRI have changed the entirety of their educational license, affecting every educational charity presumably in the world, not just one company. They haven’t just tightened up who qualifies for a license, but have put an embargo on people from a whole range of countries from so much as looking at the installation disks. If you don’t believe me, go and read the new license. We just happen to have put some planning in place before this so it’s not as much of a problem as it is for some other archaeological units that we know that were planning to put all of their eggs in the esri basket and are now in a really difficult position.
You’ll understand that I’m not prepared to give company figures over to a complete stranger on a blog- particularly as it would appear that you have some other commercial product in mind (can’t imagine what that might be…).
I don’t have time to rebut all of the rest of your points, except to say that I, my company, and practically everyone else who has corresponded with me over this on this blog or my own appears to disagree with you. Do you seriously think you are going to sell more of your own product by doing down the efforts that are going into open source development and questioning the motivation, planning and general business acumen of potential customers?
Archaeogeek:
I apologize for not being familiar with the details of ESRI’s new licensing – This “defending ESRI” stuff is so new to me I appreciate you have pointed me in the right direction.
Nonetheless, we all know organizations sometimes utilize global policies as “air cover” for specific decisions that could go either way based upon the judgments of local managers. ESRI has choices as to how they will implement a new policy and what exceptions they may elect to make.
I’m simply pointing out that if you had been planning for two years to dump ESRI for open source perhaps your message got through to them and that it was a factor in their decision to end their donations to you in a way that did not make an exception for you under the new policy. But that’s as far as I will go to defend them.
By the way, I suppose it goes without saying that no one who has benefited from an exception to the new policy will be so indiscrete as to advertise that exception on this or any other forum?
You have me there. If all your friends agree with you there obviously is no need to explain yourself by answering any questions.
But at least you are making philosophical progress – instead of you assuming your own conclusion, you go one better: you allow your friends to assume your conclusion for you.
Oh, no worries about privacy… it will be just between you and me and the billions of people who will be able to Google this archive forever into the future.
Seriously, though, I didn’t ask about any state secrets. I asked what you thought your cost per seat would be, fully internalized, for GIS using the open source strategy you have chosen. I didn’t even ask what your particular open source strategy was. My question is one any responsible IT person asks before they launch into any development project or big deployment, be it commercial products or open source.
Laying out your business case for rationality would be a great help to open source advocates who would also like to convince their organizations of the true business value of open source. Being secretive about your findings in such broad outline somehow does not seem right for someone who wants to be “open.”
Ah, now you are cheating by launching into an ad hominem attack. A salient characteristic of such attacks is that instead of discussing the substance of what someone has asked, you instead attack their motivations. For example, what I happen to do for a living in my business life and whether I think I will sell more or less has no effect whatsoever on what your costs per seat for GIS will be as a result of the development effort you intend to launch.
You’ve also cheated a bit in the social compact folks have in these blogs in that they try not to discourage participation by industry players by dragging their industry roles into it. It’s like living in Westwood or Hollywood – part of the social compact for locals is that when some actor, well known or not, walks into your local grocery you act cool about it so he can participate in the community like everyone else.
Until you raised the matter most people viewing this thread would have had no idea I had any commercial interests in GIS in my business life. They’d think I was just another particularly astute guy doing his civic duty to help a worthy “educational charity” become aware of the economic risks of what just might be an overly optimistic and not exactly rational strategy.
I also take exception to your implication that by asking reasonable questions about your planned open source development project I am somehow “doing down” open source development. If you have faith in open source you have no problem with me asking meticulous questions about justifying the use of open source in a particular project. If you get twitchy when someone questions your strategy, you are not showing faith in it.
The open source advocates I work with are a pragmatic, successful bunch who reach for open source because it works well for them. They are not at all shy about stating, rather forcefully and in a crystal clear manner, exactly why using open source makes sense for them. They do not assume their conclusions, they know “control” has little if anything to do with the benefits they get and they can quote to the dollar the costs of their major deployments.
Applying those same standards in a modest question or two posed to you about a specific case is not denigrating open source, in contrast it is simply not being willing to settle for vague assurances.
As for teasing your motivation, planning and general business acumen, well, OK, I apologize for that. But you have to understand I’m only human so when you write really off-the-wall stuff like that paranoid bit about commercial licensing I can only resist the impulse to be arch for so long. Sorry about that.
Uh, Dmitri, maybe Archaeogeek simply doesn’t have the spare time/energy to engage in the traditional open-source vs. proprietary software debate with the same enthusiasm/frequency that you do. Or indeed the same volume.
If I was worried about replacing my entire software platform in a matter of weeks, I’d probably prioritise that task above contributing yet more KBs to the world’s growing mountains of blogobytes.
Happily, you and I obviously have a little more time on our hands!
I just finally had to say something. I find Dmitri’s comments always helpful. I am a Manifold user (full disclosure) but I do try to keep an open mind. My company uses ESRI products in our engineering group because we can afford it, and the installed user base in the professional world demands it. So I would never recommend they stop as there are just too many add-ons and stuff available that they need that they can’t easily get with Manifold. And I am told that ESRI does some things better than Manifold in its current version.
So with this open mind (seems to me anyway) I wonder sometimes why others don’t try to see the logic in the persuasive arguments Dmitri poses. Most bloggers can’t refute his cogent and well stated reasons for considering Manifold as one of their GIS tools. Indeed, the 64-bit capability of Manifold would seem to me to be a deal breaker with ESRI products, and open the door for anyone who works with massive projects (most professionals) to at least include Manifold on their computers.
As far as Archaeogeek’s situation, a cost of $600 for a fully-loaded-including-everything-copy of Manifold would seem to me irresistible compared to open-source. What’s the risk? Use them all, open-source, Manifold, whatever, let the work sort out the winner.
I am with J. Forgive me if that will sound rude but Archaeogeek has found the time to write a rather lengthy blog post which was the entire reason for this thread, then write another blog post on the same topic, plus answer comments to both these blog posts. He certainly has the time.
Hi J,
Interesting post. I have no particular axe to grind here re. ESRI/Manifold/whatever. But I can’t help feeling that if I were trying to provide a sustainable GIS IT infrastructure for a charitable organisation on a tiny (and probably fluctuating) budget, I might also be inclined to conclude that, having been forced to confront the possibility of a painful transition away from ESRI because of arbitrarily imposed licencing issues, I would probably prefer to go through that pain just once by shifting to an open FOSS platform, rather than risk the same thing happening again further down the line by adopting another proprietary solution.
But as you rightly say, it’s horses for courses and it depends on what your organisation’s requirements are. I have an expensive copy of MS Office taking up disk space on my PC which does all kinds of fancy things that I never need to do. I also have a free copy of OpenOffice that I use every day because it does everything I need. I’ve also worked on enterprise J2EE systems built entirely on – and with – FOSS tools, and others built using expensive proprietary tools, and frankly I have my doubts whether the additional costs brought any significant benefits whatsoever (apart from the safety net of having a big corporation to complain to when things go wrong), despite Dimitri’s convictions about the likely quality of proprietary vs open-source solutions in the GIS arena.
Of course, I’m no expert in GIS, which is why I enjoy dropping in to blogs like this and picking up ideas from you guys. But with the pace of developments in FOSS for GIS, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that many people might choose to adopt it as their preferred platform, if they believe it will deliver what they want at a price they can afford, without leaving them open to licencing problems later on.
Either way, these are interesting times for FOSS in GIS and elsewhere, and it’s going to be fun watching how the mix-and-match interfaces between the different approaches develop. Might not be quite so much fun trying to implement those interfaces, of course…!
Well, it has certainly been an interesting debate, which I am going to bow out of right now, because it’s entirely correct that I don’t have the time or the enthusiasm to engage in the continuing arguments about it.
Last couple of points: Dmitri, if you really think that one small UK company’s decision to start evaluating open source alternatives to products as part of an ethical decision to be more open in what we do would cause ESRI to change their entire educational license, affecting many organisations world wide, then to be honest, I’m flattered that you might think we have that much influence.
Secondly, as for making exceptions to the policy, we have colleagues in other units who have made no such decision, and in fact were going to move entirely over to ESRI who now find themselves in a very difficult position. I also don’t understand how you can cast yourself as the defender of ESRI in this case when you state clearly that you’re not familiar with the license.
As for claiming that all the people who have commented are “friends”- that’s a little lame, as in the main I have exactly the same prior relationship with them as I do with you- ie none. They have offered their opinion exactly as you have.
As far as I’m concerned, decisions about going open source sh0uld be about control over what you do, and the philosophy of it, and not just about cost. Otherwise people continue to misunderstand the difference between something that is free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
And finally, is it paranoia when it actually happens? ESRI did this to us, and a lot of other people. In what sense am I being paranoid about that?
Since I don’t want to end on a bad note- Dmitri- I think you and I are always going to have different opinions about this, and that’s good. If we ever end up at the same conference together then perhaps we can get together over beer and continue the debate
I don’t know about the UK, but here in the U.S. there are numerous ways to apply for funding through grants for non-profit use to purchase software. It seems that Archaeogeek, may fall into the non-profit category and thus be eligible to buy licenses through those grants.
Ahem.
Again, I am sorry if I will sound rude, but this is one more illustration that some of us can find the time to write about various tangential issues, but will dutifully refuse to discuss the main points. What is that control over what you do that you are talking about? What are those disaster scenarios that you will prevent by using open source tools instead of commercial closed source tools and how exactly you will prevent them? One gets a feeling that this part of your “Licensing Woes” (to use the title of this thread) is nothing more than an overly emotional response to being let down by ESRI.
Archaeogeek,
Not intending to pile on, but… some clarifications:
I’m not suggesting your company changed ESRI’s entire licensing. I’m only asking if once ESRI decided to change their licensing that perhaps it was your avowed march to open source that convinced them not to grant you an exception or to cut you any slack.
Not exactly, since I am posting my comments in a public blog where everyone can debate the merits of what I write. That forces me to provide the logic behind what I claim and prevents me from making logical errors, like assuming my own conclusion, that will be immediately criticized by astute observers.
Claiming your viewpoint is correct because all of your private correspondents agree with you is not advancing a logical argument. It is a different form of agreeing with yourself.
If you are spending other people’s money it is all about cost and the specific, hard-nosed performance of the tools you choose, matters such as risk management (what “control” is usually about) being a normal and ordinary part of the cost reckoning. That is normally what people mean by “rational and strategic” as in the justification you gave for your organization’s careful interest in open source for two years.
I welcome you to reality if you agree that open source is not remotely free of cost, but I chide you for enmeshing that realization in the pretzel logic of suggesting that such cost should not be primary because you have some higher political or philosophical objective in mind, in particular if you are dragging in some undefined evasive use of the word “free” to justify whatever you like for such objectives.
Do you tell your financiers that you intend to base your IT strategy as regards GIS not on the basis of choosing financially and technically effective tools (the “cost” bit) but instead upon your political or philosophical musings? Do you tell them this is what you mean when you say your choice is “rational and strategic”?
Does your sense of “openness” extend to full disclosure and willingness to allow full examination of your politics and philosophy, so the people who support your organization can decide whether they want to finance your philosophical musings? Perhaps your sponsors or your clients might think their philanthropy for archaeology might go much further if they invested in an organization which felt it important to be cost-efficient and productivity-enhanced through a choice of GIS strategy that did not disdain such factors in favor of nebulous philosophy.
Keep in mind that in part this thread was started by you crying “poor” over the unfortunate misery of your underfunded organization at the hands of ESRI, and the need to husband resources to continue your noble mission. If that’s the case, you have a duty to keep your political and philosophical yearnings in check and not be so disdainful of cost.
I was responding to the utterly unreal reason you gave for not being interested in using commercial products:
For the reasons I set forth in my earlier reply, the above has no basis in the software licenses generally used by commercial vendors, hence my comment about paranoia.
Now, I can’t imagine anyone agreeing to a deal with such unbelievably capricious provisions, but if you actually agreed to such a deal with ESRI you have no one but yourself to blame. If you are indeed responsible for the GIS needs of an organization with 300 people it was crazy of you to base the GIS infrastructure of that organization on a deal which could go away without warning if the software vendor “can choose to take the software away [...] whenever they like.”
I have to say that your comment about the “take the software away from us” bit leads me to the uncharitable thought that you haven’t bothered to carefully survey the commercial alternatives to ESRI or to open source. If you had, you would have realized that choosing a commercial alternative need not have anything to do with such capricious licensing.
I have no ill will against you personally. I do feel an obligation to argue against misguided use of software for two reasons: first, because I believe in open source and strong arguments help the cause and second, because I don’t like seeing poor organizations get their budgets eviscerated by any inappropriate use of software, be it commercial or open source.