ESRI is a scourge on the GIS industry. One of the creators of postgis can say it much better than I can.
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.
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.
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.
The alternative to Photoshop is that I gave $40 to Pixelmator and now I have an awesome photo editor that does plenty.
Yeah, there's a massive amount of essential features just missing from OSM and QGIS. Like, even the most basic - layers. They don't even really exist in OSM side of things. Whereas if I'm doing travel-time-bands from medical centers, I absolutely must use multiple boundary layers.
Then again, I'm an engineer, not a data scientist. My colleagues (all data scientists) do all sorts of crazy awesome work. Again, unless you're hacking R/python code and piecemeal it together, you're using ArcGIS. Then again, "ArcGIS Notebook" is a dockerized Jupiter system for doing just that in ArcGIS enterprise.
edit: As for me personally, since I'm working in geoinformatics, I've been teaching myself the hows and whats. Im pretty proficient at both ArcGIS and QGis, as I'm trying to learn them side by side.
If I am doing my own projects, I will use QGis. That's not even a discussion. I'm not about to use proprietary systems to lock up my data.
Lets just say the data intersection of: density and geocoding of users, density and location of office sites, travel time bands, and service level expectations all have a part in the final calculation.
The data is either base layers imported, or calculated layers. There is no one "comprehensive layer" nor does that concept make sense. Different groups handle their own data. We import it in and use their data for our final result.
(In fact, its the OSM approach of everything as 1 layer and tags everywhere is why a DB import and data handling is so obnoxious.)
And how would that concept even apply to postgis? A postgis query can operate over many tables.
And there are a variety of open source tools that allow multi-dimensional data structures. That’s multiple layers in multiple dimensions.
So I’m hoping, if there’s some aspect of a GIS layer I don’t understand, he can explain it. Qgis totally supports multiple layers in the sense that most people think of it.
He doesn’t have to divulge “secret information” to do this. If he is referring to some aspect of the qgis architecture he can just say so. Qgis is open source, their GitHub repo is clean and well documented. Im merely asking for him to explain why it handling multiple layers is somehow not really handling multiple layers.
I worked in a GIS Lab with an ESRI endorsed all Arc stuff textbook author/instructor for a number years. Working on similar projects, for anything remotely complicated, I could implement anything he could do, with some python and PostGIS SQL, usually faster, and instantly reproducible.
ArcGIS is a crutch for people who can’t and aren’t willing to program. This goes for all data manipulation tools that aren’t focused on visualization.
If you have an ETL pipeline, probably best to get GIT involved.
Whether or not they are a good company that provides quality, unparalleled products is not a point I’m contending. They are not competing on that alone. That’s my point.
^ For instance, a really neat one that renders ocean features in as much detail as the land typically gets
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.
Have an AI crawl a RASTER dataset and VECTORIZE all lines into SVG.
Ed. "deployed"/"deployment" 0400GMT
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)
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.