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

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Some of the leading software companies in the space, broadly defined as Esri, Hexagon, and (to a lesser degree now) MapInfo, have done an incredible job over the years with making their names synonymous with GIS. They are GIS and GIS is them. Joe Morrison describes this as:

The term “category king” comes from one of the only marketing books I’ve ever purchased, Play Bigger. The basic thesis is: enduring companies market the value of their category, not themselves, and in doing so become synonymous with it.

In effect, you can’t do GIS without it. There are only a few other parallel verticals you can find this in as there is strong competition in other spaces. The few that I can think of might be:

• Google and search
• Salesforce and CRM
• Slack and collaboration
• Microsoft Word and text editing
• Adobe Photoshop and photo editing

If you think of the problem or use cases such as text editor and photo editing, these are likely the first things that come to mind. Of course, there are open source tools for all of these things as well as competitors in these spaces. Think of Google Docs or Apache OpenOffice for document editing.

But I don’t think anyone would consider the fact that you are using one of these other tools as not performing the same function as its closed-source counterpart. You are still writing and editing documents if you are using Word or OpenOffice or Google Docs. But in GIS it is different, many times you are seen as not using GIS if you aren’t using one of the major products. That is just how big of a hold these companies have on the term GIS.

Strong community

More often than not, the users and community using these tools back these ideas up. It isn’t the employees or the social media accounts of the companies touting this line in the sand, but the users of these tools. Esri is the best example of this, with their user conference having around 15,000 annual attendees, academics, and numerous partners and solutions on showcase.

The flow of ideas, innovation, collaboration, and community all centers around the tools; once again the practice and the tools have become commingled. Salesforce follows a similar playbook with its partner network and Dreamforce events.

All the people using these tools have built their careers, even large-scale businesses, off these proprietary tools. And new or different ideas can sometimes appear as threatening rather than collaborative and beneficial for the larger industry. With that said on the open source side there has been an equal and opposite reaction, with conferences focused on open source tools such as the FOSS4G conferences and others, which cements the divide even further, even though there is incredible value and collaboration to be had within both groups.

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While there are other business practices that are mentioned in the post, the one area I want to focus on is dominance in the education space. Just like many of you, I was taught geospatial analysis almost exclusively on Esri tools, namely ArcGIS Pro. And as a student, I was given a free license to use this tool on university computers. It is worth noting that this was one of many tools I had access to including Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop and Microsoft Office.

When I graduated I wanted to continue to practice and learn new skills, but with a price tag of over $1,000 and not working directly in a GIS role, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze to buy the tool just to keep my skills up to date. Shortly thereafter I found QGIS and that started my journey down the open-source path.

But because the education system centers on proprietary tools, and since the degrees that these programs issue degrees with names that contain GIS, the linkage is clear. And it is that official stamp of approval that I believe is one of the core reasons why we have this split between open source and traditional GIS.

Proprietary GIS dominates geospatial education

One thing I have wanted to study is how dominant proprietary GIS is in the higher education system. And while there isn’t likely a data-driven way to do this (the best idea I have had so far is scraping courses and descriptions and running those through natural language processing or even an LLM model) the only data point I have been able to find is from Kurt Menke and from the final post in his blog series on his relationship with Esri. From his post which you can read here:

A colleague, Dr. Phil Davis, conducted a survey several years ago and established that 95% of the GIS curricula in U.S. colleges and universities are based on Esri software. This presents both practical and ethical issues. Students typically have access to a free Esri license while in school. However, most are due for a rude awakening if they want to start consulting work in GIS after graduation, or simply continue their GIS education.

There are a few other outdated stats that are floating around the web, but based on this data, you can see the sheer dominance of programs using these tools.

The name GIS is in the degree

I’ll keep this one short. If the degree has the name GIS in it, the program has the name GIS in it, and the tools you are using are called GIS, then it only makes sense that is the way to do GIS.

Bolstered by certifications

Beyond the education system itself, many tools and organizations provide certifications that show that you have the skills to use those tools. While I in no way think that certifications are wrong or invaluable, there isn’t something similar in the open-source space.

You can’t get a certification in PostGIS or Geopandas, let alone in a wider holistic approach to GIS with open-source and non-open-source tools, outside of a GISP certification.

This has implications for hiring as well. While it you can see who is active in the geospatial community in different tools and projects, for the users of those tools the ownership of proving your skill is on the user or job candidate themselves. You are ultimately in charge of creating a portfolio or other way to show your skills. A standards-based approach to certification could help alleviate this for both the job candidate and the prospective hiring team.

Ultimately this is a topic I plan on researching further. While I am happy that some of the tutorials and videos I have been posting are helpful, I still think there is a long way to go to create a collaborative educational environment.

The real risk of living in two worlds

While the points about education, salary, and overall confusion in our space are important, the thing that I think is the biggest loss is the lack of collaboration. From a technical point of view, it is near impossible to cross some of these approaches. And yes, databases can connect to tools and you can share data, but to truly collaborate, having some common systems and languages that all of us as geographers (or those using geography) can use to share and work together is lacking.

But even before we get to that point, the inability to work with similar tools and workflows can prohibit collaboration in the first place. The simple existence of this “great debate” can sometimes stop collaboration before it can begin. And while I am not as embedded in the academic world, meaning I am not qualified to speak on the research-focused aspect of this, I see this all the time in the professional world.

The term that I hear the most is that an organization is an “Esri shop” and that is the way they practice their spatial analysis. And even before we get to the point where ideas and concepts can be shared, sometimes collaboration stops in its tracks.

But at the same time, we have evidence from other verticals that are already working in a collaborative technical environment, and in a space that isn’t so far from our own: data analytics. The core analytical stack of almost all teams (outside of the core cloud or data/analytics engineering stack) consists of proprietary tools like BI tools (such as Tableau, Looker, or Power BI) and even tools like Excel. This is combined with languages like SQL and Python and open tools to use like pgAdmin, Jupyter Lab, and more.

Even the geospatial hiring market has signaled this too. I will refer back to the charts from my video on GIS salaries. This hybrid approach is being asked for by the market, and yet we don’t make those changes in our educational approach or in methods to certify professionals already in the market. And the real risk here is that we continue to issue “degrees in tools” rather than degrees that allow their holders to think and use a range of approaches to solve problems they deeply understand.

Things are changing?

My hope is that this can change. I think there are a few areas that need to be improved upon.

Certifications

First I believe that there need to be more opportunities for individuals to certify their skills in open tools and languages that focus on their use in the geospatial context. Providing paths and resources to not only learn but prove your knowledge will benefit those entering the market and already in it.

Collaboration

I also think that creating spaces for pure collaboration and discussion, outside of tools, is important. Creating those spaces to only focus on the problems, to think like geographers, rather than jump to the how or the execution of those tools is important, especially for those in the professional space. Conferences and events focused on tools and software are fun and exciting, but those events that force us to think differently and learn are just as, if not more important.

Define a hybrid approach

What does a more collaborative and hybrid approach look like? How are those technologies implemented? When and how do you use one tool compared to another? I have found that simply sharing what this looks like and getting those stories out there is one place to start, but taking that further to define best practices and more is another view of the future.

Rethink geospatial education

Finally, I think understanding how to bring these principles to the next generation will be of the utmost importance. I have already written about how new geospatial centers and institutes are taking a new approach to geospatial analysis and GIS, but creating courses and resources to show what this can look like, share ideas and best practices, and most importantly, give new graduates the skills, ideas, and confidence to go into the workplace (and skills to map to higher salaries) is key.

I am not sure exactly what this looks like but by providing a more holistic view of geospatial education, combined with the ability for those with a GIS background to pick up those skills in addition to their core education will help more people enter into the field and use those tools. And with all this effort, hopefully, bring the power of spatial analysis that we all know and love to more places, to solve the big problems we as people who live on Earth are facing.