Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Here’s the google docs version of the talk I gave at the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference. It’s more of a general discussion on the preconceptions and limiting factors in the uptake of open source GIS in the UK rather than a run down of what’s available.

Note that I’m hoping to put up a page with pdfs of all of my GIS-related talks pretty soon, so pop back for the downloadable version with notes…

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 went into it with some reservations, partly because I was talking about open source at a conference full of software vendors, and partly  because I am pretty new to the AGI and didn’t know what to expect.

From talking to people throughout the event, as well as the entertainment that they put on, I really did feel that they were trying to get a sense of community, breaking down barriers between vendors and users. I also felt that if open source gis software is to become more widely used, it needs to engage with that community on a professional level, rather than scratch around on the edges, or out and out refusing to come to the party.

I got to chat with a lot of people from proprietary software companies, and from the Ordnance Survey, all of whom were actually really interested in engaging with open source, and open access to data.  Again, more on the specifics later. It was suggested at one point that the concepts of open standards and open source are totally separate, and therefore to make the open source case better it is important not to mix the two, and I have been thinking about this ever since. From the perspective of Oxford Archaeology’s desire to adopt an “open ethos”, the two concepts are inextricably linked, but I do see that in some cases this might not be true. The standards people might not always want to be linked with open source because they need to engage with the proprietary people too. Something to think about as we continue to promote open source GIS within the UK.

On that note, I spoke to a few people about the idea of setting up a special interest group (SIG) for open source software within the AGI, and about arranging an OSGeo/AGI SIG conference within the UK next year some time. Both these points will need some expansion so I’ll leave it at that for now…

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.

Why disappointed? Firstly, the article (which is of course a summary of a paper and not the actual paper, so possibly a mis-interpretation) confuses free software with open source, again. Lazy. It assumes that the only reason people will choose an open source product is because it is free, and not because it gives the users better control and freedom from licenses etc. Secondly, they argue that particular types of software are popular because so many people use it (circular argument?, even more lazy?). Apparently this leads to less issues with training, and incompatibility. If this was the case, would Microsoft have had so many issues when they changed the interface for Vista, or Office 2007, and the default file format for Office? Ditto Autocad with their file format in every new release? Consumers are more intelligent than that, and these things do have a big impact on how easy it is to upgrade software.

Why up-beat? Well the point has been made elsewhere that this paper only exists because open source software is seen as a threat. Not only that, all of the strategies outlined in the paper are reactive- how can businesses deal with this threat by using aggressive practices. Even making better, more compatible software is seen as a reaction to this threat, rather than the modus operandi for the company. It’s disappointing that improvement is only seen as a reaction to a threat, but on the other hand if companies are forced to improve their product, and make it more interoperable, everyone wins.

All in all I think it’s disappointing that consumers are given such short shrift in this article, and as always we have this lazy assumption that the open source argument is all about price. It does, however, show that open source software can, and does, have the power to affect the proprietary market, and I find that very encouraging indeed.

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.

Today my fellow trouble-maker and open source advocate Joseph reported back on a Freedom of Information request that he made to English Heritage, the leading heritage body here in the UK, regarding the long-term sustainability of their (proprietary) Intrasis site recording software. I quote:

“Intrasis is developed by the Swedish National Heritage Board
(Riksantikvarieämbetet), this organisation has a long-term commitment to
the continued use and development of this software package. Our present
contract is for four years, and the use of the package will be the subject of
a post-implementation review after two years.”

So, lucky we only need to keep the records for 6 years then. After all, it’s not like they are the only record remaining of the archaeology that has now been dug up. Oh, wait…

(For those of you not from the UK- you might not know about the super-fab WhatDoTheyKnow site. It’s for submitting Freedom of Information Requests to UK public authorities)

This is all extra serindipitous (how often do you get to use that twice in one blog post?) because I’m trying to write my talk for the AGI 2008 conference at the moment. I want to try and get across that there are just as many, if not more, “risks” in a proprietary software solution as in open source. I suspect that government agencies aren’t ever really going to be taken to task over these decisions and this potential waste of public money unless we can get open source software understood at the highest of levels. Well, it’s a challenge…