Our colleague has written an article reflecting on the challenges of sustainable adoption of geospatial software. We’re sharing it here.
Much of the world’s geospatial infrastructure is locked into a relationship with a small number of vendors.
For years, this felt efficient. Now it is starting to feel like a sign of fragility.
More and more people in my network are becoming alarmed by this reality. There is a heightened sense of vulnerability to the corporations and specific countries that control critical IT infrastructures. We are watching, almost in real time, how political shifts can collapse trust chains between software vendors and users that took decades to build.
Largely unprepared, we have entered an era of total dependence on software for society’s critical processes. We rarely have clean solutions – just trade-offs that stop looking acceptable the very next day.
Using high-end global corporate solutions is economically efficient. It is easy to choose stability and functionality while accepting vendor lock-in as a reasonable price.
But only until everything collapses because of a unilateral decision – or until the vendor itself effectively becomes a political actor, leveraging its influence.
The stakes become clearest in defense and critical infrastructure. As Hans van der Kwast pointed out in a recent post, Europe’s geospatial backbone still isn’t autonomous despite talk of strategic autonomy – defense workflows depend heavily on US-based platforms.
The alternative seems just as straightforward: isolation.
Push foreign vendors out. Build a closed national loop. Support domestic suppliers instead.
France is responding by phasing out Microsoft Teams and Zoom across all government operations by 2027, citing concerns about foreign legal exposure under the CLOUD Act.
This response is understandable – but it leads to the second trap.
Yet domestic vendors, once protected from competition, tend to monopolize their markets through administrative leverage. They become political actors too. In sheltered markets, quality often degrades, and the competitiveness of the “import-substitution” economy declines along with it.
So neither path really solves the underlying problem. They simply replace one dependency with another.
Against this backdrop, open source appears as an attractive idea – something easy to fall in love with.
The belief in open-source values runs deep. At NextGIS, we have been developing open-source geospatial products and spatial data infrastructures for more than ten years with that commitment. Yet even from the inside, one has to admit that open source alone does not solve the fundamental problems of how people, organizations, and states work with software today.
Even if support and integration are handled, we all know what happens when the core team behind an open-source project falls apart or changes direction.
“You will always be able to maintain it yourself” is technically true.
In practice, it is often theoretical – closer to marketing than reality.
As Jürgen van Wessel recently observed, resistance to open-source adoption is rarely about the tools themselves – it’s about confidence: who supports this, who’s accountable when something breaks, does this create risk for the people making the decision? Those questions are reasonable. But they’re organizational questions, not technical ones.
Most organizations are not prepared to become maintainers of critical infrastructure overnight. And if an open-source product is eventually taken under the wing of a large corporation, we quietly return to the first scenario, sometimes almost indistinguishably.
Which suggests that the core issue is not whether software is proprietary or open-source.
It is how responsibility, governance, and continuity are organized around it.
My main hopes are tied to something more structural: the transparent, public institutionalization of software ecosystems.
By “institutionalization,” I mean clear governance, stable public funding for core components, procurement that deliberately supports multiple vendors, and security and maintenance processes that outlive any single company or team.
In other words, resilience by design.
We are already starting to see experiments along these lines. Initiatives like OSGeo, OGC, and broader European coordination efforts such as EuroGEO – European contribution to GEO focus less on tools themselves and more on governance, interoperability, and shared infrastructure. They are not “open-source projects” in the narrow sense – they are attempts to build durable ecosystems.
And that distinction matters because resilience requires institutions.
An open form of software governance that avoids both isolationism and single-vendor dependency – combined with stable investment and public oversight – may be what human-centered governments should actually strive toward.
Some European public agencies are already moving in this direction, which gives reason for cautious optimism.
What’s missing from current efforts to build robust regional open-source ecosystems?
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share your ideas in the comments on the original LinkedIn post.
