Like many others no doubt, I invested heavily into the mapbox-gl-js library (pre 2.0). I was able to build amazing value on top of that library including a routing voice navigation app for an aged care facility that is used to this day 24/7/365. It was a very sad day when they changed their licencing model to lock in vendors and I had to walk away from that investment of my time and effort. Luckily I had also worked and contributed to OpenLayers and Leaflet, so with significant effort was able to move my clients to those platforms.
I guess we now have some more insight into why this occurred.
> "In order to use most Services, you must register for or authenticate into a Mapbox account. When you use our application program interfaces (APIs), including our SDK Registry/Downloads API, each request to an API must include one of your account's unique API keys."
I remember looking at that fork when the whole licencing thing went down a couple of years ago, but it was unclear how much, if any support it would have. Looks like the project is doing ok.
Are you familiar with MapLibre? It’s a great project. It’s an open-source fork of Mapbox GL. I’ve only used the JS variant myself but there’s definitely a native one as well.
Stay away from ESRI (ess-ray) - I should get that printed on a t-shirt.
ESRI centralise power, lock you into their technology, and IMHO a digital twin should be doing the opposite. Don't believe the sales BS about ESRI having "free" software, read the fine print, ArcGIS AINT FREE.
IMHO a Digital Twin should be something for the people, by the people! So please stop paying proprietary systems like ESRI and incentivising them to stifle innovation and increases barriers to entry.
If you want to see local jobs, growth and innovation then invest in OpenSource software like OSM (Open Street Map) and QGIS and other Open GIS products.
100%. Their stronghold on governments (at all levels -- municipal, state, public safety/emergency response) is almost total and quite unfortunate. Very reminiscent of Microsoft/Windows/Office (which have strongholds in the exact same places) or Oracle.
As one example, ESRI's web mapping offerings are very behind the times (in terms of usability, api's, etc.) Mobile support has been atrocious. Outdated software practices + government lock in = terrible public maps and little innovation.
It's not a coincidence that almost nobody chooses them in the private sector for their maps. Just as you'd be surprised to learn that a startup picked Oracle as its database vendor...
I have worked with a few people with GIS degrees and 99% of them know ArcGIS and ArcGIS only. This situation reminds of how dominant SAS and Stata used to be before R and Python exploded.
Is there a FLOSS GIS solution that could rival ArcGIS?
Esri is becoming like the Microsoft Office/SharePoint/Teams/Power ecosystem. Many of the individual products are of limited quality and better alternatives exist. But taken together they have network effects and are easier for corporations to manage and justify.
The open solution is QGIS and PostGIS. They are ridiculously capable. But I think the next battleground is actually access to data rather than the software. Esri have been building an open data repository that is becoming favoured by a lot of government organisations. They stream data to esri users and make people reliant on the cloud service. And add annoying intermediate steps for people wanting raw data suitable for loading into a real database.
The problem is that ArcGIS isn't just software; it's also data, data management/storage/interop, process automation, and so on.
There are other sources for the data, and a lot of the data is open, but the Python/R model doesn't translate directly because those sources have to be individually licensed and integrated. And once in a blue moon you'll need ArcGIS for the data anyways and now your whole FOSS investment is up in flames because you fork over the license to get the data anyways...
You can do a lot of what ArcGIS can do if you know the entire ecosystem and all the data sources and how to glue them all together. But that skillset approaches "Senior SWE", at which point the generic GIS major + an ArcGIS license is waaaaay cheaper.
In fact, ESRI could probably get away with drawing even more blood.
(don't get me wrong; I think OP is correct that esp gov't agencies should invest in FOSS solutions, and the amount of effort required for a full digital twin is definitely worth NOT doing on top of ESRI tech... but the value add of ArcGIS for most GIS applications is difficult to deny given the differential in labor costs you get by staying in the ESRI sandbox... there are literally hundreds of undergraduate degree programs that basically exist to churn out affordable ArcGIS techs... the same is not true for FOSS alternatives, where to get comparable expertise you literally need to hire something comparable to a Senior SWE; it's going to cost you waaay more than "fresh GIS major + $4K".)
+1 for QGIS and PostGIS. Without being a GIS expert I was able to develop a solution for storing and querying invasive species abundance (and other ecological) data using these tools, and they worked _really_ well, and the researchers who were using that data were able to access it from their R environments without issues.
I am not a GIS expert, but I work with spatial data all the time and have never touched an ESRI product (besides pulling data from servers running their crap). I do nearly everything in QGIS and publish using GeoServer or standalone PostGIS. I have never encountered a situation that would be only possible or way easier to use ArcGIS.
I feel like (and I'm welcome to being corrected by any experts here) ESRI stuff is kind of like Adobe CC - the vast majority of people have absolutely no need for Photoshop/Premiere/... and could do everything they need just as easily with any one of the many open source or cheaper alternatives. Most people use it because that's what they learned on, which is because that's what most people used at the time (and also because of very "generous" education licenses, teacher training...)
We should ask the long term question, what if QGIS and other FLOSS products had broad support and significant resources flowing into them that ESRI has?
The way I think about it, often the same people, certainly people with the similar skillsets are working on all these products, most of them just follow the money.
I think one big missing piece of the puzzle for governments to assess these products is a governance and risk model associated with these products. But software engineers generally don't give a crap about governance, so we need more people who do care about that to invest in OSS. I'm seeing some movement on this like the Github Sponsors initiative.
I see these articles a lot, and always wonder why people go it alone. Can anyone link to a discussion about a distributed community run firewall? Does such a thing exist? If so, please comment.
I don't know exaxtly what you mean by a distributed community run firewall but https://crowdsec.net/ collects information (anonymously) on the attacks users see and shares it with all other users after vetting them. So in this way the community helps itself (or each other, if you will). Currently around 800k signals are collected daily and around 19k ips are shared back to users as blocklists.
Government has been sold on the "Hobbes" vision of society and believes an assertion of authority is necessary in order to prevent civil chaos. They will never give money directly to people until this changes. https://issuepedia.org/Hobbes_vs._Rousseau
I looked into vending machines many years ago and the overheads were massive. Insurance, maintenance, local government approvals, stocking, supply chain issues, vandalism, and the list goes on and on... it is a business where you must scale. You need to be running a fleet of vending machines to make it worth the hassle. There are some interesting companies tackling some of these issues in the IoT space.
