Thanks to Adena, we’ve got some more details on ESRI’s work with Data.gov and ArcGIS.com:
An article entitled White House to tie together mapping and data sites? recently appeared in NextGov magazine. Some of the information included in the article was either incorrect or not entirely clear. The information below is intended to help clarify some of the information that appeared in the article.
Read the whole statement over at All Points Blog. My two cents is that this is still a smart play by ESRI. ArcGIS.com is about “apps” and if you can develop apps on government data easily, it should be successful. Closed or not, ESRI is center stage on creating apps with federal data.
As far as the sole-sourced contract and those details, I’m not sure if anything has been addressed on that. This clarification almost causes more questions to be asked than answered.