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QGIS and PostGIS were my jam when I worked in that space. We were an ESRI shop so Oracle/SQL Server with SDE (topped with ArcGIS) were the official tools. Some
by nobleach 4y ago
QGIS and PostGIS were my jam when I worked in that space. We were an ESRI shop so Oracle/SQL Server with SDE (topped with ArcGIS) were the official tools. Some of us were always looking for ways to subvert the culture by building tools based on open source stacks.
One of my favorite experiences from that era: We were meeting with a few ESRI reps for some integration stuff. The lead hot-shot was on his phone playing around during the meeting. He was basically on autopilot. The other two folks were working with GeoJSON response convertors. I said, "I built one of those with TopoJSON". One guy said, "I've never heard of it". I showed them how it was much more efficient and used splines instead of points. The lead dropped his phone and said, "I need you to tell me MORE about that". I showed them the service. They invited me to lunch, I politely declined and said, "today's my last day so I have a ton of things to wrap up". I do miss that realm sometimes.
- tomrod 4y agoI love QGIS. It's like a super useful Excel of mapping, and so much more. I've had difficulty making it work for production services (especially extensions). Ultimately moved more towards the Python/OSM stack. Such a fun space.
- nine_k 4y agoWhat made it problematic to run in prod for you?
- whoopdeepoo 4y agoESRI is a scourge on the GIS industry. One of the creators of postgis can say it much better than I can. https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2018/11/esri-dominates.html
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoThe educational world needs to stop supporting them.
- dvisca 4y agoBut it's the other way around. Esri offers so much in the education sector apart from software licenses in a complete package, which you unfortunately have to search for in the FOSS sector.
- nwallin 4y agoThe business world needs to stop supporting Microsoft Office. The creative world needs to stop supporting Adobe Photoshop. The industrial design world needs to stop supporting Solidworks/AutoCAD. Everyone needs to stop supporting Microsoft Windows/Apple OSX. etc. I've been telling people for years they should be using GIMP and Linux but nobody cares. At least Oracle's stranglehold seems to be weakening.
- heliodor 4y agoHave GIMP developers ever discussed usability? Because it sure doesn't show! The alternative to Photoshop is that I gave $40 to Pixelmator and now I have an awesome photo editor that does plenty.
- wolverine876 4y agoTry Krita - FOSS, excellent UI.
- gonzo41 4y agoYou can add matlab to that list.
- 2devnull 4y agoYes, that is the apex of their human capital Ponzi scheme. But, you’d have to wait until the current profs who only know esri retire. Or until they put in the effort to learn how to use foss tools. The only motivation they might have, is a strong belief in foss or pressure from students who know esri is a trap.
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
- walrus01 4y agoSounds remarkably similar to Oracle, or other "too big to fail" things that sell ridiculously priced software to CTOs.
- retcond 4y agoIt's not the software licensing, but the independent consulting entourage that's the problem : internal confidential big four accountancy information told to me without any applicable restrictions on my repeating this put the cost of each Oracle database instance deployed in the F500 at over one hundred million dollars, due to the third party make work. Ed. "deployed"/"deployment" 0400GMT
- TimTheTinker 4y agoThat author doesn't say Esri is a scourge; more like it's just generally bad to have only 1 provider in a space -- and that it's up to customers to change that by voting with their feet. I think Esri is (and has been) in a very similar position to Microsoft's in the late 1990s -- having achieved market dominance, they feel like open source software is the biggest threat to their business. But I think the presence of QGIS is creating competition, which is nothing but good for the industry. (I worked as a developer for Esri for 15 years)
- 7952 4y agoESRI have similar network effect to Microsoft. No individual product is that great but taken together it is very competitive. And ArcGIS online is developing that network effect in a similar way to Office 365. Also, the GIS space tends to have crossover between different departments in companies. You have a mix of IT departments, GIS specialists outside of IT departments managing infrastructure, data management, casual users etc. Each has a different budget and a different competitive environment. ESRI sits as a compromise between these different groups. Each group may be able to adopt a competitor but not gain traction outside their group.
- isoprophlex 4y agoNot having done much in terms of GIS work, I never had to deal with ESRI until last week. I was on a call to ask some ESRI rep to add some labeled points to my client's existing map tool. It was a somewhat surreal, weird experience where I got the feeling they were making the work seem much more difficult than it was. Their estimate turned out to insanely off the (my) mark, at eye-watering hourly rates. At first I thought they had enough business and didn't really care about us. But reading this thread, it seems I was wrong. They are the Oracle of the GIS industry.
- rat9988 4y agoAdding labels to a map in a readable fashion is not an easy thing. ArcGis solutions, last time I tried, were way better in this space than QGis.
- dagw 4y agoIn their (possible) defence, stepping outside the the narrow ESRI path of the way you're supposed to do things makes your life a massive pain. I used to work for a company that (among other things) developed tools for clients on top of ArcGIS Online. And I've had many calls where a client asks for a small and very reasonable change, and I embarrassingly have to explain that that is not the 'approved' way doing things in ArcGIS Online, so trying to make that change will essentially require us to rewrite a whole lot of components more or less from scratch and might no even be possible. I've spent a large number of hours trying to fight ESRI software, lost more fights than I've won and even my victories have mostly been pyrrhic.
- isoprophlex 4y agoThanks for the perspective, I'm entirely new to the space. We're supposed to use ArcGIS. So if this turns out to be the least painful path, I'll have to learn to deal with it...
- dagw 4y agoArcGIS the desktop tool, or ArcGIS Online? The desktop tool at least has a pretty complete (but pretty annoying) python API so that if/when you have to, you can circumvent the GUI and automate almost everything. ArcGIS Online is unfortunately extremely inflexible, and things that should be easy are often impossible.
- jakear 4y agoIs there a better option for raw base tilesets? When making my app mapping world tides (https://solunar.pages.dev https://solunar.pages.dev) I tried OSM for instance but it only had raster tiles at LoDPI resolutions available. ESRI on the other hand had full vector support in a variety of formats^ and provided great docs for integrating with FOSS rendering toolkits. The free tier seems generous, though once it runs out the price increases sharply. ^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features in as much detail as the land typically gets
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoWell, the main other player here is Mapbox.
- jakear 4y agoMapbox's free tier is an order of magnitude less permissive. They even charge for loading their JavaScript: $5 per kiloload! Feels like the best approach if I'm not trying to commercialize is just to encourage people to self-host using their own API key. Assuming the service ever even gets to 2M tile requests/month. That alone would be quite the accomplishment. Though with Gaia going to hell, something new needs to come along.
- kabes 4y agoLoad osm data in postgres and generate the tiles yourself with something like geoserver/mapserver
- dagw 4y agoThe cost and effort of deploying something like that in production is decidedly non-trivial. I know because I've done it. Unless you need the customization and flexibility such a solution offers, it's rarely worth it.
- samstave 4y agoIf there is one thing I want AI to accomplish ;; Have an AI crawl a RASTER dataset and VECTORIZE all lines into SVG.
- LeonB 4y agoSplines instead of points — boom! That sounds awesome.