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Open Source and free GIS: A way out?


Paolo Cavallini
cavallini@faunalia.it
Faunalia
Piazza Garibaldi 5 - Pontedera (PI)
Italy
Web: www.faunalia.com

OPEN SOURCE AND FREE SOFTWARE
What is free software? What about Open Source? Without going too deep into the legal and philosophical issues (a review can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), we can say that a computer program is free when everybody can use, modify, and redistribute it. This implies that the source code of the program must be available, and that usually no licence fees are requested. We thus usually refer to these programs as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). One must be careful to distinguish free programs in the restrictive sense of gratuity; there are many proprietary (closed source) programs that are distributed for free, sometimes as demos or runtimes of larger packages (e.g., in our field, ArcExplorer). The distinction is important, because having access to the source code is essential to guarantee that free software will remain free forever.

In recent years, interest on FOSS has grown considerably, both because of budget choices, and because of the ample scope for customization and reuse; also issues of democracy of information and elimination of the digital divide have a place here. Well-known successes include the dominant position of Apache (http://www.apache.org) among web servers, MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) among web databases, etc.

Several elements make FOSS particularly attractive in the developing countries:

• relatively scarce financial resources, both in the private and in the public sector, push towards the adoption of low-cost solutions
• the availability of skilled programmers (notably in the case of India, but also in many other countries) able to exploit effectively the scope for customization and further development of existing or new tools
• resources invested in FOSS development remain in the country, and may help building up a national software industry, whereas money invested in proprietary software (i.e. licences) goes largely abroad.

Several factors hinder a wider and faster adoption of FOSS in many contexts: freedom implies the availability of a wide variety of products, not all of which are mature and fully functional. It may therefore be difficult, at first sight, to identify the best solutions for a specific application; furthermore, the lack of a solid commercial structure (and the advertisement that come with it) does not help “spreading the word”.

This paper aims at giving an overview of GFOSS, and provide you with an evaluation of its strong and weak points, with particular emphasis on its possible use in a professional context. While striving for a maximum objectivity, the paper necessarily reflects my particular point of view, i.e. that of an end user, without an IT background, mainly concerned with geographical analyses. Further information is quite easy to get, especially from the Internet; a good starting point is http://freegis.org.