The educational world needs to stop supporting them.
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.