The open source geospatial community tends to focus heavily on technical solutions, but how do we ensure that we are engaging customers on the benefits of open source solutions or that our customers even properly understand what open source means to their business?
Can we engage our customers to encourage their projects to be contributed back to the open source core, can we get them interested in supporting core projects, do they even care that they are using an open source solution at all?
Customers are used to proprietary licensing models and have an inherent understanding of them, but many don’t understand open source models beyond the superficial ‘it’s free’. Convincing clients to build on open source is relatively easy, convincing them to support open source projects that they have leveraged is often more difficult.
This talk discusses our experiences and challenges in Australia with collaborating with our clients on open source projects, particularly for customers with a limited technical background.
