Back in December, I wrote a post about Microsoft Case Studies “proving” that moving from open source to Microsoft would have massive cost savings. When you looked into the actual case study, rather than the fluffy press release that they put out, the story was rather different. A few comments that I got suggested that other people didn’t necessarily see the case study in the same light, so I was pleased to see a repeat performance.

I attended a seminar on “Business and Sustainability Models around Free and Open Source Software” a couple of weeks ago run by OSS watch, who are an advisory service on open source and free software to the UK higher and further education establishment. It was targeted mainly at academics (not unsurprisingly), who had ideas of creating software and were trying to decide the best way of releasing it- closed or open source.

I love it when two mutually contradictory posts land in my reader. To be fair, you can argue that they are not, but then where would be the fun in that? Number One: Speedy Hire (UK equipment hire company) saved 1 million pounds by moving to Microsoft Everything from linux-based pcs running open office etc. Number Two: Massachusetts Geographic Information services have gone over to open source GIS to cut costs (amongst other benefits).

I’m just back from the AGi Geocommunity 2008 conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. A very enjoyable time was had by all I think! I would have posted from the conference itself, but the hotel wifi wasn’t keen on playing with my linux laptop. I’ll talk more in other posts about the actual presentations, but this is just some of my general thoughts about the conference. My overall thought was that the AGI got it right with this event.

I guess a lot of people will have seen the article on slashdot pointing to an article on a Stanford/Harvard paper on how businesses can win against open source software/technology. I don’t want to get into a debate about how the authors are in fact the spawn of the devil, as you can read the slashdot comments for that. Personally, I started off being slightly disappointed by a number of points that they made, and then quite up-beat about the prognosis for open source as a result.

In that serindipitous way that rss readers work, two posts came to my attention over the last couple of days. The first was from Gavin, about problems that occurred when the South African Government failed to keep control of the source code on two GIS programmes that they had developed. When contracts end, or funding dries up, if you don’t have complete control over your programmes then you might as well start rebuilding them now.

A couple of people have remarked to me that one reason that they are not prepared to make the open source jump is the lack of support. Well, last week I wrote about a mastermap importer that I had found. I said I would like to be able to merge the huge numbers of shapefiles produced into more manageable chunks. I got a lot of good advice as to ways I might be able to do that using gdal, which is really handy, BUT I also emailed the developer about the same problem.

I’ve been following the “Timmy’s Telethon” debate with great interest, as, I’m sure, a lot of people have. I’m a little surprised that there hasn’t been more comment from different blogs about it, but there we go. The whole debate struck a chord with me though, for the simple reason that I am involved in the process of trying to change the mindset of an organisation from a reliance on closed source software to one where open source alternatives are used, where possible and appropriate.

This is an idea that seems to come up every so often- what GIS programmes can you run from a USB stick. Well it appears that the list has just got longer. I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools.