Public administrations that switch to an open source software model and contracting for services, also transform the costs previously spent on acquisition and maintenance into budget for research, development and innovation, says Álvaro Anguix, general manager of the gvSIG association.

On 29 March, the gvSIG suite of geographic information system (GIS) solutions was one of the winners of the Sharing and Reuse Awards, part of the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2017 in Lisbon, Portugal.

In his presentation on GvSIG, Anguix noted that this change in business model is one of the key impacts of gvSIG. Previously, because of the high licence and maintenance costs, the use of GIS was very limited. GvSIG has spread the use of GIS tools to many parts of the Generalitat Valencia (Valencia public administration), and is now used by many more of its engineers, architects, biologists and geologists. The software reached into new areas, such as road management, city development, and tourism. Open source makes it easy to reuse solutions developed by other public administrations, and all this helps to change the business model, he said. “We move to a model that transforms costs into R&D.”

Across the globe

The development of gvSIG was started by the Generalitat Valenciana in 2002. The public administration funded the EUR 1,400,000 development costs until 2010, when the independent, non-profit gvSIG foundation took over. Development is now self-sustaining, says Anguix, with contributions coming from around the world.

GvSIG is used in about 160 countries, and is used by local and regional administrations, national governments, and international organisations including IUCN, NASA, JRC, FAO and IAEA. The community is similarly global, with some 50 user conferences taking place in 13 countries.

More information:

gsSIG association
Presentation at the Sharing & Reuse conference (video)
Presentation at the Sharing & Reuse conference (pdf)
OSOR news item