This concept discusses the technical, organizational and monetary advantages and disadvantages of proprietary versus open source software. GIST industry and research are slowly but consistently moving toward the openness of software. Open software entails some clear advantages such as continuous development of new applications, building community of developers and users, starting a project even if limited funding is available, increasing the chances of a project’s sustainability, to name a few. On the other side, proprietary initiatives in GIST are keeping their roots to the ground by developing cutting-edge tools to handle challenging and critical environments in large private sectors and public administrations. Advantages of proprietary software include more stable software, a well developed documentation and personalised customer support service. Both open and proprietary geospatial software solutions can co-exist by applying the appropriate IPR licences for each type of solution. The future trend is to balance how proprietary and open source geospatial software complement each other and find synergies in increasingly complex and large projects.