Timmy's Telethon #0

In the comment thread at James Fee’s posting on building an open source application in an “ESRI” shop, “timmy” provides the most complete laundry list of incumbent vendor objections to open source I have seen in some time.

The list is far too comprehensive to do in one post, so I’ll do them one at a time.

As a general note, many of the items are not really specific to open source or geo-spatial – they could be used by any incumbent market-leading vendor to attack a smaller competitor.

There is also an apples/oranges thing going on here, since the default GIS vendor (ESRI) is at a different point in the technology adoption cycle than open source. Open source can’t strongly appeal (yet) to conservative late adopters, and ESRI is finding it hard (at the moment) to appeal to technically savvy early adopters. (Technology book recommendation: Crossing the Chasm is a must-read for anything thinking about the software market.)