Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Why open-source?

Operating in an international context, export restrictions on software were in 

conflict with the interests and operational requirements of the agency. Training 

 local staff in the use of proprietary systems negatively impacts the sustainable use 

of staff and resources because of prohibitive license schemes. The intention of 

training is often to convey the concepts behind a data management process. The 

practice often is that the tools used during the training become the instruments 

 people  are familiar with and want to use. Creating a dependency on expensive 

tools that may not be affordable or even legally be usable in the long run of a 

project is counterproductive and can even lead to illegal use of such tools. Encour-

aging the use of tools that can be legally used in the long run was one of the 

 arguments to opt for an open-source software solution.

Projects usually have a limited lifetime, often constrained by the available re-

sources within an organization, priorities at management level and influenced by 

the always recurring need to do things differently over time. A long term invest-

ment into one complex project can therefor not be expected to come from a  single 

source. If it is possible to share the cost of development and maintenance,  chances 

are much higher that long term sustainability can be achieved. Producing an ap-

plication as open-source software helps to convince interested parties to take 

ownership of the tool and to contribute effectively to its further development.

The GeoNetwork project started in 2001 with an internal planning and devel-

opment phase that produced a prototype system. The prototype system was pre-

sented and used within the FAO. Then, collaboration was started between the 

FAO and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) that had similar re-

quirements and wanted to actively contribute resources to the development of the 

software. That second stage did not see any source code published and there was 

no activity undertaken to create an open-source community. The initial release of 

source code took place only after a first version of the software was finished. At 

that point we also setup a mailing list for communication with the broader com-

munity of potential users.