[Animats]

Three blogs deep, there's a link to the actual paper.[1] It's a study of one project, a geospatial database:

"Starting in 2009, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) and its partners developed GeoNode: web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data. Today, GeoNode is a public good relied on by hundreds of organizations around the world ... GFDRR’s direct and in-kind investment in GeoNode over the past six and a half years has been in the range of $1.0–$1.5 million USD. Partners have also made significant investments in GeoNode; a conservative estimate of these partner investments comes to approximately $2 million USD over the same time period. GFDRR’s investment in GeoNode would be a reasonable amount even viewed strictly as a software development cost: the GeoNode software today represents an approximately 200% return on investment in terms of code written, since thh current GeoNode project would most likely have cost $2.0 – 3.0 million USD if GFDRR had produced it alone as proprietary software, without building an open source community around the codebase."

This is an unusual situation; many people need geospatial databases, and contributing their local data is useful to them. The value here is in the data, not the code. This is more like Open Street Map than a software package.

[1] https://opendri.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/OpenDRI-and-G...

[knz]

> This is an unusual situation; many people need geospatial databases, and contributing their local data is useful to them. The value here is in the data, not the code.

I disagree. Every organisation with geospatial data needs these types of applications and tools like GeoNode are viable alternatives for organisations that are invested in FOSS GIS or that can't afford ESRI.

I've worked in GIS at national, state, and local level government and have fought the same battles to bring open source GIS tools into the enterprise at every level - IT leadership are almost always enamoured with COTS products (i.e. ESRI) and resist the FOSS approach of having to assemble something equivalent to ArcServer/ArcPortal etc. Having solutions like GeoNode allow FOSS to actually compete with ESRI when the decision is being made by IT leadership who know nothing about GIS and are impressed by "solutions".

[tryitnow]

Thanks for the research. Whenever I see ROI numbers my BS detector goes off.

[richdougherty]

Summary: open source allows costs to be shared between parties. GFDRR got $2-3 million of software, but only had to cough up half of that because it was open source and there were other contributors.