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Don't forget, QGIS is one of several projects of OSGeo. A significant part of the fundamentals come from GDAL, another OSGeo project, which is very excellent if

by geenew 4y ago

Don't forget, QGIS is one of several projects of OSGeo. A significant part of the fundamentals come from GDAL, another OSGeo project, which is very excellent if you ever need to do some command-line processing of or need a library for raster or vector GIS data. Their licensing isn't perfect - the QGIS installer, for example, more-or-less requires acceptance of a few free-as-in-beer but still proprietary licenses, which are used for some specific raster formats. Still, it's one of the great free software success stories, I think. It definitely feels like they will eventually displace ESRI. Most shops will probably keep ESRI around for some format conversions or niche tasks. However, the day-to-day desktop GIS is almost exclusively QGIS in the places I've worked, if only because you can throw it on any machine you want to without worrying about licensing.

otter-in-a-suit 4y ago
I did call out GDAL, but missed the whole OSGeo ecosystem, I’m afraid. Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing. It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.
- geenew 4y ago
  > I did call out GDAL I see that now, sorry! Excellent article, by the way, it's very useful to have this kind of writeup. I suspect it's something to do with the distributed installation, and the amount of the required behaviour that is sitting behind completed specifications. Eventually, it will be cheaper for a user to just pay for development of any remaining features they need than pay for licensing. And, the functionality addition is cumulative - pay once, keep forever.
dinkumthinkum 4y ago
I mean I don’t want yo dis ping your experience but no shot. I’m not sure where you worked but esri just is a massively dominant player still. I’m government and infrastructure, which is esri’s primary market, QGIS is nowhere near replacing it on the desktop. Now, QGIS is a great project but we can’t be naive about the situation.

by geenew 4y ago

otter-in-a-suit 4y ago

I did call out GDAL, but missed the whole OSGeo ecosystem, I’m afraid. Very cool to hear that QGIS is such a prominent piece of software in professional settings! I’m just a software/data engineer who dabbles in this stuff for fun, so I had no idea. Lots of comments here asserting the same thing. It would be amazing to see OSS (even though not truly FOSS) replace industry giants. I see this happening a lot in my space, where a lot of OSS (mostly Apache, some MIT and consorts) overtakes commercial offerings.

geenew 4y ago
> I did call out GDAL I see that now, sorry! Excellent article, by the way, it's very useful to have this kind of writeup. I suspect it's something to do with the distributed installation, and the amount of the required behaviour that is sitting behind completed specifications. Eventually, it will be cheaper for a user to just pay for development of any remaining features they need than pay for licensing. And, the functionality addition is cumulative - pay once, keep forever.

dinkumthinkum 4y ago

I mean I don’t want yo dis ping your experience but no shot. I’m not sure where you worked but esri just is a massively dominant player still. I’m government and infrastructure, which is esri’s primary market, QGIS is nowhere near replacing it on the desktop. Now, QGIS is a great project but we can’t be naive about the situation.