An Interview with the Founder of QGIS | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with the Founder of QGIS

xyht.com

61 pointsmaxerickson26 comments

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

I used QGIS extensively in my dissertation research and I actually prefer it over ArcGIS. I found ArcGIS unintuitive and clunky, whereas it was much easier to figure out things in QGIS. QGIS is not the greatest UI ever, but ArcGIS is miserable (for me anyway).

Completely agree though, it would be really nice to have a proper QGIS interface library.

You can also use the model builder to create a graph/node based workflow.

> One thing I wish QGIS had though is a command line interface.

You can do lots of geodata transformation using the wonderful GDAL suite and lots of QGIS' transformations are just wrappers around it anyway - in fact QGIS often tells you the exact GDAL command it is going to run (and then conveniently loads the results in the GUI).

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.

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

QGIS indeed has this in the form of a Python interface you can use to write your own code:

https://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/user_manual/processing/scr...

The wonderful thing about the processing framework is how it gives bindings over several other GIS OSS tools like gdal.

In fact, you can run scripts developed using the Python interface without having to open the QGIS GUI at all. See the below gis.stackexchange question for a snippet on how to do this:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/152762/error-algorit...

Its presence is growing in the commercial and govt spaces. Oddly enough, I actually see it used more in those than in academia. Definitely a growing presence in all three though.

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.

You can use the GTFS that many agencies put out. There are a bunch of tutorials and tools out there to help; mainly people import it into a PostgreSQL database that has the PostGIS extension installed. Here's an example: http://opendesignarch.blogspot.com/2014/03/loading-gtfs-data... and another tool to help http://cbick.github.io/gtfs_SQL_importer/html/index.html

Thanks, the data isn't in GTFS, and loading it isn't an issue as it's GeoJSON. What I'm mainly looking for is overlaying routes on a map, and being able to export that as PDFs once I'm done.

There is Vector Tiles Reader plugin [1], but it doesn't render fonts on QGIS 3 at the moment. I was able to use it with a map server to add a vector base map, and overlay my routes and stops (although still missing the offsetting bit).

[1] https://github.com/geometalab/Vector-Tiles-Reader-QGIS-Plugi...

What do you mean? Simply a map of a route (use Atlas) or a sexily layouted network map (that requires extensive manual work).

I'm thinking a simple geographical map, with lines drawn so they overlap (where there are multiple lines/routes on the same segment).

My partner is a mechanical engineer, and she says it's easier to create MTA/MBTA type of network maps on AutoCAD, but I want something with the geography still intact.

Hey, you might be interested in what my company does. 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/

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.

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.

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).

I work for a company that integrates very tightly with Esri (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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com