Case Studies Considered Harmful?

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?