Open standards are the cheapest insurance in your GIS stack

Nobody budgets for the migration out. Systems get selected on features, and five years later the real price appears: thousands of layers in a proprietary format, scripts that speak one vendor's API, and a quote for the export project that rivals the original license.

Open standards are how you cap that risk on day one. GeoJSON and GeoPackage for vector data, GeoTIFF for rasters, and OGC services — WMS, WFS, WMTS — for anything served over the wire. When every layer can leave the building in a format the next tool already reads, vendor negotiations change tone noticeably.

This is not an argument against commercial platforms; it is a procurement test for them. Ask two questions of any GIS you evaluate: what formats does it export without an add-on, and can another system consume its services without a license? Platforms confident in their value answer quickly.