Dear ESRI, it’s not me, it’s you
UPDATE: We’ve had some more feedback about this from ESRI UK- see my other post for details (though don’t get too excited because nothing *really* changes)
So, our move to open source gets a boost today, from an unexpected quarter. In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an educational charity we are no longer allowed to have an educational discount for using their software and, not only that, our license codes will cease to work at the end of this month. So, we have 3 weeks, with the Easter holidays in the middle, to extricate ourselves and our ongoing projects from ArcGIS and into something else or find the many thousands of pounds to buy the full licenses for all of our staff.
I should explain something about the nature of “commercial” archaeological units in the UK, to those that don’t know much about them. We are usually not affiliated with universities, so we are not educational establishments as such, although we are an educational charity. We exist to fulfil a legal remit to study the archaeology of an area before it is developed. We also undertake educational projects on behalf of English Heritage, the government’s body in charge of cultural heritage. The whole reason we exist is to further the archaeological and historical understanding about the country we live in.
Previously, my biggest gripe has been that we can’t get academic discounts for data, unlike our colleagues in universities or local government. Despite the fact that our job is a legal requirement, we have to pay through the nose for the mapping that we need to do it. Getting hold of geological data, or anything that might allow us to look deeper into the area we’re studying is often out of the question. But at least we had the software to work with.
I can’t figure out what ESRI hope to achieve by this. It clearly affects many other educational charities apart from ourselves, across many different industries. Do they think that we all have secret pots of cash hidden under our desks and that we’re just going to throw up our hands and go “fair cop guv, we’ll pay the full cost now, here’s 7,000 pounds per user”? Do they seriously think that 3 weeks is enough time to get the money or rebuild all of our work in other packages?
Well ESRI, in case it’s not clear, we’re not going to buy your full versions. It’s unlikely that we will ever use your software again, and you’ve made it much easier for us to openly campaign for open source solutions throughout our own industry and other related sectors, and anywhere else where people are concerned about getting screwed over by software vendors.
So, we have to part company. It was nice knowing you for a while, but you’ve changed and I just don’t think we’re compatible any more. Now, where’s QGIS…
You might consider http://www.manifold.net as an alternative. There is an academic license if that suits your needs.
Hi Mike,
We could try manifold, but I think this whole issue (and we’re going to have the same problem with Autodesk as well) proves to us that we want to be in control over what we use, and not subject to licenses where the definitions, and whether or not we are considered eligible, might change… call us paranoid I guess but we can’t afford for this to happen again, given the amount of time/money we will lose just transferring our projects over.
Thanks for stopping by though!
Jo
How easy do you thing you can change to an OS package, if you are familiar and use everyday ESRI’s family products?
Hi Kosmas,
Well, how easy is it to totally change to any new package, OS or otherwise? While clearly native grass has a bit of a learning curve, I don’t think there would be much difference if we sat someone down in front of mapinfo, manifold or QGIS or GvSIG and asked them to get familiar with it. One benefit of going over to a free (as in beer) package too, is that we have saved money on buying the product that we can use in training people if we need to.
Also, we as a company have quite a lot of familiarity with open source packages in general, and have been evaluating some of the different options available to us for a while now. We also have the portable gis package (soon) to make life easier from a setup point of view.
Thanks for commenting!
Jo
I guess the answer to Kosmas is - probably less than £7k/user.
Pity, just as ESRI were getting the whole REST thing…
[...] Cook writes about ESRI’s crackdown on licensing: In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an [...]
Well, that sucks.
By coincidence, I’ve just started a series on my website listing basic (and in some cases not-so-basic) free GIS programs, open source and not.
Part one
Part 2
Parts 3 and 4 coming soon …
Hi Leszek,
Well I’d have thought we’ll be checking your list out in the next few weeks whilst we try and figure out what to go with. I thought QGis because of it’s GRASS integration, but apparently some of my colleagues are having issues with stability, which we are trying to track down so we can file bugs/ask in the forums. GvSIG is another possibility but we’ll have a look at your list too
Cheers
Jo
I’ll be keen to hear how you go with doing your stuff with the open source versions. I wouldn’t be too worried about Manifold changing their academic licensing anytime soon, but it’s affordable to buy anyway.
Be sure to check out the spatial capabilities with R, especially the sp, rgdal, and spdep packages:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html
[...] This has to be a mistake. I can’t imagine the logic for forcing such a policy. [...]
I sympathise with the short notice you have been given and the cost of ESRI products outside the USA. But we ALL have to suffer this premium. Even commercial organisations. I know the price is 3 to 5 times the cost of the same product in the USA.
It seems that ESRI is only being consistent with the Ordnance Survey who are not offering you an educational discount for data either. Surely its the structure of your organisation that is the problem? How many other groups would qualify for a discount if you were elibible? Every government quango? Every private non-profit institute? Everyone??
Alternatives? Many of them are not that much cheaper for the same functionality. You have not even mentioned Smallworld, MapInfo, CadCorp, Intergraph, Autocad Map. Perhaps consider ArcView licences instead of ArcInfo? Reduce the number of licences? Manifold will probably meet your needs. If you can’t afford their charge per seat, then I would recommend you urgently find some more funding quickly before you disappear completely.
It seems that open source map web servers are performing well, but they do not do much spatial analysis, so I don’t see open source being a viable alternative for you
I agree with James that this has got to be a mistake. I can’t believe ESRI would give you (or anybody) such a short notice to come up with “thousands of pounds.” I am no ESRI fanboy — I criticize them routinely on my blog — but this just doesn’t compute.
[…]This kind of thing is why I wouldn’t want to open my own GIS oriented business with proprietary software.[…]
@Everyone: ’scuse the long comment here. I have been personally asked by “the company involved” not to post any more about this until the situation has been resolved as “there are ongoing negotiations to give us some continued discount that may be compromised by my continued blogging”. Interpret that how you like- but they didn’t mention commenting…
They are blaming this on a communications error between us and CHEST, who negotiate the discounts in the UK, and say we should have known about it months ago. We didn’t, and neither did our colleagues in another archaeological unit, as far as I can tell. The issue still stands though, that if we go down that route we are still subject to their continuing goodwill, and if they decide, for whatever reason, to change the license then we’re back in the same boat.
@Eskimo: Government “Quangoes” probably already get their data and software at reduced cost via different agreements. However all educational charities *are* going to be in the same boat, and given that we are not legally allowed to make a profit, I think we should all be entitled to the discount, given the ludicrous costs of the software in question. You talk of reducing the number of licenses, which is fine, but we have nearly 400 staff these days and approximately 60 using ArcGIS on a regular basis, so we’d be looking to find some serious money to kit them all up. The reason I didn’t mention any alternative closed source packages is that we would be in the same boat- subject to the license, and that’s a position we don’t want to find ourselves in any longer. Furthermore, if we are going to be subject to the disruption of having to move over, I would rather we got to save some money on buying software and ploughed that in to making sure there’s a package that does what we need. We believe that there are viable open source packages around for what we want, though there are some bugs, and this gives us the impetus to help with the development of those to make them even better.
[...] charity” en anglais, à but non lucratif donc) Oxford Archeology vient d’être notifiée par ESRI qu’elle ne pouvait plus se prévaloir des remises “éducation” pour ses [...]
We exist to fulfil a legal remit to study the archaeology of an area before it is developed. We also undertake educational projects on behalf of English Heritage, the government’s body in charge of cultural heritage…..
So you have a quasi-govt function. I too work in the public sector and get my salary from public tax - are we that different? Do you ask BP for a petrol subsidy and Office World for cheap stationery and Starbucks for a 50p coffee? Why should ESRI subsidise your organisation anymore than a public sector body?
an overview on opensource desktop gis I am working on:
http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/
note: I list only free & opensource software, not software that is free for download. You may consider such software as well (or maybe not.. see the example of Forestry GIS).
@Felix
“Why should ESRI subsidise your organisation anymore than a public sector body?”
Yes, It’s ESRI’s prerogative not to subsidise not-for-profit educational charities. Then again, its ESRI’s prerogative to lose hundreds of seats worth of licenses and get a boatload of bad publicity into the bargain.
@Felix: Throwing your question back at you- is it OK if you buy your stationery from Office World and then they come back a bit later and take it away, asking for more money? The issue isn’t *so* much about the cost, as the fact that the license agreement was changed with so little notice. Furthermore, no organisation can be expected to budget for a 350K increase in costs with 3 weeks notice.
@Stefan, thanks for the list- it’s incredibly useful!
admin: I do understand your incredulity at what appeared to be a crass decision - at least in terms of notice - but your subsequent posting appears to suggest there may have been a mistake in the detail. I hope for you the situation will be resolved satisfactorily.
Andrew: The educational discount is a hard-nosed business decision - lots of goodwill for the price of the media - and in terms of educational institutes, those learning on ESRI will probably carry this through into their professional lives. The whole issue may be a mistake, but I agree, on the face of it, not the best publicity stunt.
However, my main issue is with the whole subsidy issue - if revenue is not generated due to subsidies - who judges the merits as to who receives the subsidy? As a public employee, my organisation pays up in full, as a tax payer I (we) therefore, pay up. So in effect, we are ’subsidising’ archaelogy whether worthy or not.
[...] von hier [...]
Sorry to hear about your licencing problems - I hope a reasonable solution can be found at least to allow you to manage the transition to open-source over a sensible period!
Felix: I too am a taxpayer, and I’ve worked in commercial software development for 20 years. You’re absolutely right that companies like ESRI are out to make a profit, and by golly don’t they just! Subsidised “lock-ins” for the public sector are a great way to do this, which is why all the major software providers take the same approach: offer discounts to encourage government clients to buy their own chains locking them into your software, then start tightening the chains to squeeze more money out of them. This is a common problem for both software procurement and development all over the public sector, as I’m sure you know.
The problem for charities is that - unlike most government organisations I’ve ever worked for - they really do have to answer for their costs and cannot simply reach into the public purse for a hand-out or fiddle the accounting process to shift costs off the balance sheets. And, as here, those charities often exist to meet a public sector need for which the public sector (and the Treasury) refuses to take responsibility.
So, as a fellow tax-payer, I think it’s time to look after our taxes more wisely and clip the wings of the massive software suppliers by insisting that public sector IT is based on open-source products wherever possible, instead of allowing the corporations free rein to exploit the public purse. If somebody really needs a full-on ESRI licence stack instead of a cheaper (or free) alternative, they need to make a more persuasive business case for it than “ooh, it was a bargain!”. This might help to release UK taxpayers’ funds for more worthwhile purposes than filling the pockets of the likes of Jack Dangermond.
Meanwhile, good luck to all at Oxford Archaeology in their journey to the Free World!
Felix: “As a public employee, my organisation pays up in full…”
Are you sure? Most public sector places I’ve worked in get some kind of discount for their major software licences compared to private sector rates (at least initially), especially if (a) they are a big department and (b) their purchasing staff are vaguely competent. If you’re not getting a discount, your purchasing people are either not trying hard enough or you really need to start looking at alternatives! Good luck, anyway.
@Felix et al: I don’t want to get into a big debate about subsidies here, because it detracts from the main issue here, which is about their ability to take the software away from anyone- including your company, if they so desire, just by changing the license agreement. By all means, have an opinion on the other “angles”, but I really want people to think about the licensing issue because it’s neither fair nor tenable (if enough people complain about it!)
@Everyone: Thanks for the good wishes- I will keep people posted on our eventual decisions/software choices.
You might as well get out from under ESRI as soon as you can. Anyone who’s been working with ESRI for any length of time knows that the company is run entirely by its president and found, Jack Dangermond. It’s a privately held, not publicly traded, corp. That means their governance is all up to the owners, not shareholders. Jack’s been running the company since its beginning (longer than Bill Gates ran Microsoft) and someday he’ll retire or be gone. AFAIK, there’s no order of succession within the company. When Jack leaves, there’ll be a power struggle, some factions wanting to sell out to Oracle or somebody, some factions wanting to go public, etc. What you can be sure of is that the entire product line (which, let’s face it, is based on 10-year old technologies with a bit of surface polish) will shift. Maybe absorbed into the product line of a larger acquiring company, maybe users will (once again) get another “forget all you had invested in the old thing, here’s the new thing” story (like AML, Avenue, MapObjects).
Best to jump off now before the trainwreck.
In tinkering with GeoServer I noticed that Postgres’ database GIS extension PostGIS includes a shapefile conversion tool. When exporting your data, try to include shapefiles in case that format is useful for your migration.
And I thought I had problems with Esri and the New Chest Licence, working in UK Archaeology Higher Education, at least I’ve still got access, as long as I’m not a Proscribed Foreign National
Best of luck with it all, will be interested to see how your soloution progresses.
[...] commenti nei Blog spesso nascondono regali inattesi: uno è ad esempio in un post di Jo Cook di Oxford Archaeology. Jo ci parla delle difficoltà che ha avuto in seguito al cambio [...]
Chapeau to your decision about leaving the greed ESRI for GFOSS…
Free software for free people
try MapWindow GIS or Quantum GIS or gvSIG
both are open source
Perhaps a little bit off topic, but I think that it is possible to over state the charitable/education bit in relation to Oxford Archaeology. It is effectively a commercial contractor, albeit doing lots of nice value added touchy feeliness in order to fulfil it’s charitable requirements. As an employee of an uncharitable organisation, I might be tempted to say welcome to the real world and that this is prime example of the weird world of UK commercial archaeology. Anyone for a level playing field?
Good luck in escaping ESRI though, I’m playing with Manifold.
@Gary- those are actually our main contenders. None of them does exactly what we want, but the combination seems to work for us, and hopefully we will be able to contribute something towards the development.
@Richard- sorry to see that you have some kind of issue with Oxford Archaeology- what’s the basis for that exactly? Given that we are an educational charity, and therefore subject to all sorts of regulations how we can make money and what we can do with it, then I don’t really see how this decision of ESRI’s makes for a level playing field between us and non-charitable companies. Fancy giving up your profits? We’re also pretty happy with what we do to fulfil our educational remit and have a board of trustees who’s very function is to make sure we do that.
Slightly off-topic, but anybody who’s interested in open-source in general might also be interested to see that it’s starting to move into the mainstream - you can now study for a BSc in it:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/prospectus/courses/compsci-opensource.php
Meanwhile, how are things going with the ESRI licence issue, and have you started your migration to OS yet?
Hi Chris,
I totally agree that it’s going more mainstream and it’s great to see a university course in it. Regarding the licensing, well, apparently these things take time to resolve, according to ESRI. They gave us a month’s grace on our existing licenses, but that feels a little like “good cop, bad cop” to me, and we are feverishly trying to figure out how to to everything we need to in a different package. Gvsig is our current best contender, as it has a lot of the functionality we need, but we also have to contend with a certain amount of (perfectly justified panic) from staff who are going to be in rather a difficult position at the end of the month when they need to swap to the new package. So there’s a lot of user discussion going on. Expect more blog posts when it’s all sorted one way or another…
Sorry, I’d just like to say I have nothing whatsoever against Oxford Archaeology - in fact I hold you in pretty high regard.
I just think it’s a weird facet of contract archaeology that some units have charitable status, when it comes to buying software I’m just envious, as at the full exorbitant market price it’s pretty much impossible for me to make a business case for buying anything but the most basic ESRI product, which will of course contain 500 tools I don’t need. What actually bothers me is that I think having such large units as Oxford and Wessex having charitable status might not be good for the archaeological market/wages (not as bad as university & council units though). But this is surely a BAJR rant…
On a different note, I liked the Perry Oaks GIS package, has Oxford done similar with other non-Framework packages?
Cheers,
Richard
Hi Richard,
I had to chuckle when I saw your comment because you’re the kind of people we really want to reach with the “open archaeology” argument. We want to prove that it’s possible to manage perfectly well, if not better, with open source software rather than paying for commercial software particularly if you don’t need all the functionality. So- come and talk to us, we can certainly advise on that side of things!
We have worked on similar GIS packages for some of the other big projects, but to be honest our focus is now on more interoperable software and packages, and web-based stuff.
All the best
Jo