[2devnull]

Yes, that is the apex of their human capital Ponzi scheme. But, you’d have to wait until the current profs who only know esri retire. Or until they put in the effort to learn how to use foss tools. The only motivation they might have, is a strong belief in foss or pressure from students who know esri is a trap.

[dinkumthinkum]

That’s not a very good take. Esri is not a Ponzi scheme in any way. There isn’t an alternative for serious GIS. QGIS is a good open source tool but it is nowhere near esri.

[2devnull]

They explicitly target the universities as part of their business model. That’s why I say it’s a human capital Ponzi scheme. They give products out to students and educators way below cost, with the specific intention of making the field as a whole dependent on their products. This is well known and pretty explicit. If professors and students had to pay the same costs as private enterprise for esri products the demand for their products would plummet. This is their business strategy and it’s well known and more or less undisputed.

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.

[tarotuser]

As a systems engineer who was hired explicitly for a massive migration from 2 disparate ArcGIS Enterprise environments to an AWS one...

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.

[2devnull]

Couldn’t you do travel time bands with postgis? I think so, but if it’s not possible please explain why.

[sohnakukkar]

Can you elaborate why layers are needed in travel time band type analysis?

[tarotuser]

No, because any further details would highlight where I work and specifically what office.

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.)

[Demiurge]

What you’re describing sounds like it fits perfectly into PostGiS. You can have tables and you can normalize your geospatial data. With SQL, and temporary tables, you can build absolutely any analytics.

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.

[sohnakukkar]

What features do you think are missing in QGIS which hamper you in your work? I am asking because I am developing a spatial query engine which will work directly with openstreetmap.

[2devnull]

I’m not sure that I believe you know what you’re talking about. Not trying to be offensive in that statement, but “can’t back up my very broad, generalized statement with any detail or explanation” comes across as though you’re afraid to reveal your lack of understanding about the details you elided.

[dinkumthinkum]

You’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? He is saying you can’t really do GIS without multiple layers. This is basic knowledge for anyone working in GIS.