Why the open source vs. traditional GIS debate needs to stop

A unfiltered, behind the scenes perspective into this debate from my recent YouTube video release

Photo by Tony Schnagl: https://www.pexels.com/photo/top-view-of-men-playing-ice-hockey-6469031/

This is a video that I have been thinking about making for some time and the topic itself is one that has resonated with me for years. I sort of steered away from it since the topic itself can be a bit contentious, for both the open-source and traditional GIS community.

But it is the fact that both groups can seem so at odds at times and that it almost seems that “purity of approach” tends to dominate the debate rather than, what I believe the majority of those in geospatial believe, and in fact practice. At least from my experience, it can be easy to dig too much into the approach rather than the outcome. Or more directly, people get way too attached to the tools, almost wearing the fact that they have a pure approach one way or another as a badge of honor.

The other issue here is that on the traditional GIS side, it almost seems that if you are not using tools that are:

• proprietary in nature

• widely taught in higher education programs

• provide certification

then you are not in fact “doing GIS”. There seems to be some sort of monopoly over that term that says “This is the way you do GIS”. And the only other path is to do open source despite the fact that it lacks those attributes. It is somehow different, even seen as not correct, just because it isn’t part of a contained ecosystem, isn’t widely taught, and doesn’t in fact provide a central certification process.

Yet that flawed reasoning is why I made this video. For me, having worked with “open source” tools for the majority of my career it felt very odd when someone says, “Oh that is cool, I haven’t tinkered with open source” as if it is something different, or foreign to the work they do.

I think this is the reason why, since a few software companies dominate the education space and distribution of content around GIS, so many individuals and organizations have tried to create a variety of different terms for the practice of GIS without the traditionally used tools. And it is actually here where I would like to start, around the alphabet soup of terms that define our space.

Let’s define some terms

Before we start, broadly there are two groups of terms I think most everything falls into. The first group represents the practice of something. Broadly, this makes up the ideas and implementation of those ideas to perform some sort of analysis to learn something about the earth.

The second group represents the systems, tools, and technology used to perform the practice listed above. With that let’s see which terms fall into which group.

For me, the following terms fall into our practice category, or the first one listed above:

• Geospatial

• Spatial analytics

• Spatial data science

• Location intelligence

• GIS

And these terms fall into the latter category of tools:

• GIS

• Modern GIS

• “Open source”

• Earth observation, remote sensing

While this isn’t a comprehensive list, you can see that one term seems to make its way into both categories: GIS. The issue here is that by name (geographic information system), GIS is in fact a tool or technology. The definition from National Geographic:

A geographic information system (GIS) is a computer system for capturing, storing, checking, and displaying data related to positions on Earth’s surface.

The definition from Wikipedia is even more direct:

A geographic information system (GIS) consists of integrated computer hardware and software that store, manage, analyze, edit, output, and visualize geographic data.

It’s very clear that GIS is just the tool to perform any number of spatial analyses, so there is really no reason to include it in the practice category. By conflating GIS as a practice rather than just another tool, the practice of GIS is really just the implementation and execution, or set up and maintenance of those tools.

In short, GIS is a tool, not a practice.

There are a few issues outside of this that I see as well. The common role in our space known as a GIS Analyst is a bit strange to me. Compare that to the role of a Business Analyst. You rarely see a role such as BI Analyst since the Business Analyst is the practitioner of the BI tools, applying them to solve problems in the business. GIS Analyst maps more to the concept of someone analyzing specific tools rather than using them to perform analysis. A more appropriate title would be something like Spatial or Geospatial Analyst.

And linking your career path and title to a specific software can be extremely limiting in terms of growth opportunities. The gap that I uncovered between GIS Analysts and Business Analysts in my video on GIS salaries was consistently around $15k for any given level.

So to get back to the comparison between GIS and open source. Why, if both GIS and open source are in fact technology tools, are they seen as uniquely different?

Why open-source ≠ GIS

There are a few answers to this question in my mind. The first few have also been highlighted in a post from Joe Morrison which you can find here. While his post focuses on Esri, I will add my take on them below which can apply to any of the core proprietary GIS tools.

Market positioning