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QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

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21–30 of 131 posts

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#21
post #13

Is this on its way to pushing out the incumbent proprietary solution and becoming the standard a la Blender? Or is this more LibreOffice -it’s there, but missing so much functionality/polish that an expert will immediately find blockers vs the status quo?

Probably closer to the first situation. It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community. When I started working with GIS at work, expensive ESRI products were default in this market, a la matlab in another field. Most coleages of mine had not heard about QGIS. Now QGIS is ubiquitous. It did to ArcGIS and its countless paid add on modules what scipy/numpy did to matlab.

>It curb stomped ArcGIS in the geographic information system community

Maybe for home or casual use, sure. I use a ~$4500/y Esri license level and it's worth every penny.

Also, plenty of people are still using matlab!

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#22
post #18

When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.

I think it did to GIS what Sagemath did to free/open source mathematical software. It integrated everything in a nice package, freeing the users from the burden of dealing with countless disparate packages.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#23
Qgis is great on the desktop. On the browser side I find openlayers to be a well thought out gis framework.

A lot of things are evolving though in the gis world. You can now, even in the browser, render huge datasets with geoparquet, geoarrow, wasm and webgl.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#24
post #19

QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Mar…

We are running mapserver in production in the cloud (AWS lambda) to visualize lots of different data using WMS. We're also doing lots of processing using GDAL in the cloud as well. Compared to ESRI it's amazingly cost effective even considering Amazon's high prices.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#25

Is this on its way to pushing out the incumbent proprietary solution and becoming the standard a la Blender? Or is this more LibreOffice -it’s there, but missing so much functionality/polish that an expert will immediately find blockers vs the status quo?

LibreOffice vs Office 365/Google Drive is probably the more relevant comparison.

I won’t comment on market share, but even if theoretically QGIS totally displaced ArcGIS Pro/ArcMap/ArcGIS on the desktop, the arena of competition has shifted to ArcGIS Online and its competitors. And once you’re in ArcGIS Online, Pro becomes the convenient choice for desktop editing.

LibreOffice could be miles better than Office on desktop, but the competition is lost because Office on desktop is just an accessory for Office 365 (which competes with Google Docs/Drive).

Disclosure: I work at Esri.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#26
I had geo data to find a new city to move out, with lat lon, population, price, etc

I just used leaflet, it was fine

spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database

unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#27
post #18

When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.

> When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL (...)

GDAL should be front and center. It's the xkcd 2347 of earth observation and geographical information systems

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#28
post #18

When you mention QGIS, you should also mention GDAL, JTS, udig, geoserver, open stree maps, open scene graph, FWtools etc. Open source GIS has awesome list of projects and people, QGIS being only one of them. It really fascinates me.

and of course the king - PostGIS

and also that qgis installs 1g+ of all these goodies tied together.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#29
post #7

QGIS is great. It's a slightly janky version of ArcMap, but ArcMap has always been janky anyway, so it doesn't matter for most things. And QGIS is super extensible. There have been so many random times that QGIS has helped me out over the years. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to it!

Do you work in GIS field and it is useful? I am trying to see how a GIS tool will help a typical audience here that may be a little interested in maps + data.

its good for teaching, otherwise it may be super clumsy with large layers and this is unsolvable in the near future. ref. ticket.

even so, we must admit, is still the most comprehensive opensource something to compete with esri.

Re: QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

#30
post #26

I had geo data to find a new city to move out, with lat lon, population, price, etc I just used leaflet, it was fine spatialite is also good enough as a spatial database unless you are doing complex stuff with GIS data, I don't see the point of using such a large software

leaflet is a tile rendering library. You can't edit or massage the data in any way, and most GIS work is not that complex--but it does require handling paths and other things that leaflet cannot really do.
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