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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: [gislist] ArcINFO |
| Date: |
01/13/2004 07:15:01 PM |
| From: |
Mike Juvrud |
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Dean,
I couldn't agree with you more. ESRI clearly has a gaining
monopoly...and will continue to charge whatever the *~#@ they want.
Unless you are a government organization with a statewide negotiated
price...you get bent over every year.
I'm an independent developer with no special deals. And it is very
expensive to maintain an up-to-date license. Forget developing for the
extensions, I don't even bother. It just isn't worth the cost. Ever
wonder why there are so few decent, independently written scripts &
extensions for ArcGIS. Well, it's the price. Folks that enjoy tinkering
with the code on their own time, don't have access to the software out
of the office. There is nothing like NOT being able to take your work
home with you...because you have to pay thousands for your own license.
And most developers won't even learn the ArcGIS object model because the
price for the software is so high. They spend their time on products
that they can actually afford. It certainly isn't a hobbist's program.
And now, ESRI has even cut the student licenses to a single year. There
is nothing like reducing the pool of new folks who are able to use the
software let alone develop in it. It is absolute crap if you ask me. Of
all the programming students in my class last year...I was the only one
who even looked at ArcGIS let alone bought the software. Luckily I
bought a student license before they cut it to a single year. But I'm
waiting for that deal to end in a bunch of zeroes.
As a result, I've been helping on some open-source projects. It won't be
for a couple more years that the open source options start to offer the
same functionality as ArcInfo does today. It's too bad. But eventually,
ESRI will feel the open source sting.
I guess there is one benefit to the high cost of the software. The job
market for those who know the software is fairly secure. And of course
there is nothing like paying ESRI a boatload for training, since most
colleges won't pay the high software costs to teach it themselves.
If this is an indication of anything, the GIS department at the local
technical college just closed last year. Why? A big part of it was the
software costs were so much higher than any programming division...and
the only software the division used was ArcGIS. The costs just couldn't
be justified when making budget cuts. Other divisions where teaching
several operating systems, programming languages, software packages,
etc... And all of their software combined was cheaper than ArcGIS
licenses for the students & instructors. When ArcGIS 8x came out. All
the students had to be on the campus network to work on projects. Let me
tell you, there is nothing like being on a dial-up connection and trying
to remote connect to a database.
As a final thought: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft bought ESRI one
of these days. Wouldn't that just be a kick in the $%@?, not to mention
the wallet!
Regards,
Mike
Minnesota, USA
-----Original Message-----
From: GIS (IPS) [mailto:ipsgis@mto.co.za]
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2004 5:59 AM
To: gislist@lists.thinkburst.com
Subject: [gislist] ArcINFO
Hi All,
Let's rock the apple cart a bit. Before I do this, I need to ask the
people responding to this mail to keep objective in terms of software,
specifically in not trying to promote certain GIS software.
We work with corporate, mid-sized and small companies as well as
individuals. We've been using ArcINFO for years when we were still part
of a larger company (who could easily afford the software), but now we
have to look after ourselves and rely on the bigger companies to support
the privilege for them to have access to ArcINFO. We all know what they
charge for the software and maintenance, but in the end is it worth it?
Is the ability to be able to edit and create Geodatabases really worth
that much? Currently I see more editing abilities with extensions (on
ArcScripts) for shapefiles than Geodatabases. Without going overboard
with advertising the software, what other alternatives have we got?
Something reliable and yet something we can use for our bigger clients
(specifically something we can connect to Oracle and run the spatial
data off it, as in the case of the Geodatabase).
Just a comment: Something which really annoyed us is the fact that we
had to pay maintanance for ArcGIS 8.x while they sorted out the bugs and
now only it seems that version 9 will be the "official" release. We had
to work with coverages from our old database and couldn't edit it
without having to go to the workstation module. What's the new
interface for then...just an appetiser until you get 8.3 or 9 where you
can edit the Geodatabase and give it topology? For a country like South
Africa it's not easy to pay the amount of money which ESRI's always
asking for software (have you seen what the extensions
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