Over the past month, I have been trying to compile a list of good
case studies of organizations using PostGIS in their daily business. So far, it seems hard to get people out of their shells and say what they are doing -- even when you promise to do all the work of writing up the story!
I know from things like the membership of the postgis-users mailing list that there are some big companies using PostGIS. Big names in the geospatial world use it for all kinds of production oriented tasks. But apparently they do not want their stories told.
This is not a problem unique to PostGIS. Other open source projects suffer from the same "shy user" syndrome. I read the postgresql-advocacy list and often see comments to the effect that "my client is a huge company, and they love the performance they are getting from PostgreSQL, but they do not want to be publicly named".
What will it take to get big organizations to "out" themselves?
Friday, August 18, 2006
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1 comments:
It's a shame that people in larger organisations are shy about their use of open source. A good case study can make a technology more acceptable to other organisations. Perhaps the shyness is driven by a desire to not have commercial vendors spreading FUD about their efforts within their own organisations.
Personally, I've used PostGIS for two projects here in Australia. Both were pilot/demonstrator type projects done for government agencies. Neither project was overly complicated, and PostgreSQL, PostGIS and MapServer did the job easily.
An opportunity is looming to create a spatially enabled data store that will be used for historical analysis. That would be an opportunity to get value from PostGIS's spatial operators and functions. After seeing the cost of the commercial offerings I'd love to do it using PostGIS. However, there are stumbling blocks related to coexisting with the incumbent spatial vendor's tools.
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