I went to an OS GIS (Open Source Geographical Information Systems) meeting this week at Open Sourcery. This is a group of people that work with digital mapping systems. Most of them were from either various Government agencies or PSU (Portland State University). There are some well established proprietary software products on the market, and there are some open source tools available as well.
Maps get used for so many purposes with so many different data bases that you almost need a unique solution for any particular application.
There is one mapping software company that is offering a free two year license to any Oregon agency. Obviously the plan is to get as many agencies as possible hooked on their software so when the two years are up they will come crawling back, begging for their next fix and willing to pay whatever the vendor wants. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The vendor is going to have to deliver a useful product, there is competition out there and one of the competitors is offering free software, i.e. open source.
The real question is whether the program will do what the agencies are trying to do, or is it everything so specialized that doing a custom build is the only way to get what you want?
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