
An Interview with the Founder of QGIS - maxerickson
https://www.xyht.com/spatial-itgis/godfather-of-qgis/
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thibautg
I convinced our IT department to add QGIS in the company’s Software center.
Now everyone can install it without admin rights. It’s the best way to replace
expensive proprietary software with great FOSS software.

QGIS is a really really good open source project. It’s the Firefox for GIS.
It’s very approachable for a novice provided you can give them data sources to
play with. For expert users, almost all fields can be data defined and almost
everything can be scripted in Python.

I gave them 20 bucks a few years ago and I’m cited in the credits. They also
thanked me personally.

If only I could convince my company to donate (hundreds of k€) to such
projects (QGIS and PostGIS) instead of giving away money to Oracle Spatial,
ArcGIS Entreprise and SAP HANA... which are not bad per se but not worth the
price.

~~~
scblock
I’m trying to get my company to do the same, and also start a recurring
donation to the project. No traction so far, do you have any advice?

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scblock
QGIS is truly excellent. I'm a frequent ESRI ArcGIS user, but I'm pushing to
put QGIS more in our workflow, including field work. And I use it for personal
GIS projects as well.

As ESRI moves farther away from making useful products that can adapt to fit
our workflows, and more into rent seeking, I move more parts of our process to
QGIS, and port more of our custom python tools over.

~~~
samcheng
What are you using for python? PostGIS? osgeo/gdal? Some of the other
libraries like Shapely or pyshp?

~~~
scblock
Most of our stuff is focused on calculation and interpolation on raster data,
so a lot of numpy with appropriate hooks. Porting varies, sometimes it’s as
simple as changing a couple of function calls to gdal, sometimes it’s
trickier. I’ve only made it through a couple of the simpler tools, like a
mesoscale wind map based energy production calculation and a wind resource
grid interpolator that were originally standalone anyways. The gdal calls to
read and write rasters are pretty easy to use.

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hannofcart
I used to work for an enterprise GIS vendor who generally contacts for Indian
government departments. Primarily, we were trying to offer competition to ESRI
for bagging government contracts.

Quite honestly, the ecosystem of products offered is really really bad. ESRI,
the market leader by far, tries to cram their really clunky software with
aggressive marketing. Most of the time, these Govt. departments just end up
buying ESRI products that is of little everyday use to them. We beat them out
several times by offering a product with far fewer features but much more
customised to the needs of a specific department.

Recently though, Indian government departments that use GIS extensively (and
governments are among the biggest consumers of GIS products) are seeing a
shift to using QGIS. Now they invite tenders just asking for custom GIS
plugins to solve a specific issue they want.

It gladdened my heart to walk in to a control room in one of these centers and
see nearly every terminal running QGIS. Of course, this makes it tough for my
company, but I felt quietly happy knowing that this was absolutely the right
way to go. Kudos to whoever in government who's made these choices.

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adim_web
I used QGIS to extract data from Corine/CLC2006 for custom Flightgear scenery
some time ago. A very intuitive and powerful piece of software. I think it's
more popular in universities than in commercial space. Thanks to the author
for the effort to make GIS easy for us GNU/Linux users.

~~~
zzleeper
They definitely use it in academia; it gives poor PhD students a nice way to
work with GIS data (sure, you can pay for a student ArcGIS license but then
good luck after graduation..)

One thing I wish QGIS had though is a command line interface. In order to
rerun studies or results, I would like to be able to rerun data
transformations and so on, but the current mouse-based way doesn't help there
(if you have a loooot of pacience, you can also script it in python, but it
would be insane to port every mouse click and action into a script).

~~~
thibautg
Like Autodesk, Matlab, etc., Esri has a very clever marketing and gives away
ArcGIS for free for students. I followed university courses in geomatics and
ArcGIS was the de facto tool for assignments. We all got a free 1 year
license. But I always preferred QGIS because it works better with PostGIS. And
also because it is awesome and FOSS. The assistants giving ArcGIS lessons all
used QGIS (with PostGIS and Python) for their real research projects.

~~~
mkesper
First shots for free - this really should be a forbidden practice.

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nevi-me
While there are QGIS users here; I've been trying to find a way to create
transit maps from QGIS. Does someone know of a plugin that could help?

I'm fairly new to QGIS, and I'm enjoying a lot of the smaller things about it,
especially QGIS 3. We were mapping some minibus taxi routes over the past
month, and I needed to do some conversion of files, export PDF maps and a few
other things (snap to route, distance calculations). I normally write
something from scratch with turf.js or rustgeo, but I found QGIS very
satisfactory.

~~~
nkoren
Hey, you might be interested in what my company does.
[https://www.podaris.com/](https://www.podaris.com/) is a platform for
designing transit systems -- not just creating maps, but calculating velocity
profiles and travel times, fleet sizes, and (soon) making ridership
projections etc.

We've developed a plug-in for QGIS, discussed here:
[https://blog.podaris.com/going-geospatial/](https://blog.podaris.com/going-
geospatial/)

This plug-in doesn't work with the latest version of QGIS, however, and we
haven't been able to allocate resources to update it. The aim is to do so and
then make it open-source, as an example for how other 3rd-party software can
talk to our API. If this is something you'd be interested in working on,
perhaps we could open-source it sooner rather than later. Get in touch at
info@podaris.com if you're interested.

~~~
nevi-me
Thanks Nathan! The pricing on your site looks like something I can afford. I'm
doing the work as a side-project for the "benefit of my community", I'll get
in touch via email shortly.

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protomikron
Wow, thanks.

QGIS is a wonderful piece of software, I hope it continues to improve and it's
already a valuable tool for all things map related (raster- and vector-based).

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marpstar
I work for a company that integrates very tightly with Esri
([https://www.esri.com](https://www.esri.com)), which has the largest market
share of any GIS company (over 40%). We use their JavaScript SDKs for our web-
based maps, integrate with their online spatial analysis APIs...the works.
This is all great, but many of their offerings get very expensive quickly.
Most prices aren't even available to see on their site without an account.

I haven't used QGIS beyond downloading it and playing around, but I'm glad to
see FOSS solutions in this space.

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mr337
I use QGIS for part of our tooling. It has been invaluable to work with GPX
and shapefile overlayed on maps. Excellent project!

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notafraudster
QGIS is excellent, but personally I stopped using it as much when R's spatial
data pipeline got better (particularly since the excellent sf package came
around). Now, granted I probably was never a power user of QGIS -- just making
very simple choropleths and stuff -- but the R, code-driven approach is more
to my liking and I've run into fewer rough edges than I did with QGIS. Still,
really mad respect for the software, and so glad that undergrads are learning
on open software instead of paying buckets of cash to ESRI.

