It would also be nice if ESRI/ArcGIS could be replaced with a better open format for government stuff. I know the reason is because ESRI cuts sweet deals with governments and has the “unified system” approach that’s lacking from the GDAL wild west, but it’s a pain having to constantly translate between proprietary and open formats.
At least ESRI has basically stolen GDAL code meaning that they have a lot of functionality overlap, but the proprietary formats are hard to audit and always have some weird caveat that makes them incompatible with open formats without a bunch of wrangling.
Basically, made the GDB and SHP formats open standards and if you’re gonna push Arcade as an interface layer for geodata, at least publish the language spec instead of just randomly changing major language features with the only release note being “bugfixes”. Get fucked Jack Dangermond.
starting maybe 9 ish years ago, i began i using QGIS for everything. i stopped advocating with employers to get me an ESRI license and i let all my student/researcher licenses expire.
the only time ive run into roadblocks are with public institutions that are ESRI-knowledge only and the staff that weirdly, proudly declare their ignorance of QGIS and warn me any software issues I have won’t be supported… as though their support for that shitpile is worth 5% of what they hoover up in licensing fees.
the process of learning QGIS and how stable/intuitive it is compared to ESRI’s subscription kludge was what truly started me on my FOSS joirney.
The only think keeping us on it right now is the fact that it’s got a nicer drafting program draped over top. Which is what we use it for.
The software is such a pile of garbage now, anytime you actually want to use it hidden behind 15 menus, the license model just randomly changes every quarter, they keep adding new features and not fixing literally critical regressions (you can’t split at a vertex when the map reference differs from the feature reference in 3.4-3.6 because they messed up something in the new data model. This has taken a backseat to adding an AI agent to the tool search bar).
I use primarily arcpy in my work to interact with the design database and source data, but to get that into a usable state required me writing 3 wrapper libraries and becoming the #1 question answerer on their developer forums because apparently it’s just trash and no one cares. I’ll make recommendations with sample code and find out that they just straight up copy pasted my example into the codebase the following quarter.
I have loved my interactions with shapely and gdal systems though. Planning on modifying my libraries to use them as a fallback so I can try and have a unified interface for both systems.
It would also be nice if ESRI/ArcGIS could be replaced with a better open format for government stuff. I know the reason is because ESRI cuts sweet deals with governments and has the “unified system” approach that’s lacking from the GDAL wild west, but it’s a pain having to constantly translate between proprietary and open formats.
At least ESRI has basically stolen GDAL code meaning that they have a lot of functionality overlap, but the proprietary formats are hard to audit and always have some weird caveat that makes them incompatible with open formats without a bunch of wrangling.
Basically, made the GDB and SHP formats open standards and if you’re gonna push Arcade as an interface layer for geodata, at least publish the language spec instead of just randomly changing major language features with the only release note being “bugfixes”. Get fucked Jack Dangermond.
starting maybe 9 ish years ago, i began i using QGIS for everything. i stopped advocating with employers to get me an ESRI license and i let all my student/researcher licenses expire.
the only time ive run into roadblocks are with public institutions that are ESRI-knowledge only and the staff that weirdly, proudly declare their ignorance of QGIS and warn me any software issues I have won’t be supported… as though their support for that shitpile is worth 5% of what they hoover up in licensing fees.
the process of learning QGIS and how stable/intuitive it is compared to ESRI’s subscription kludge was what truly started me on my FOSS joirney.
The only think keeping us on it right now is the fact that it’s got a nicer drafting program draped over top. Which is what we use it for.
The software is such a pile of garbage now, anytime you actually want to use it hidden behind 15 menus, the license model just randomly changes every quarter, they keep adding new features and not fixing literally critical regressions (you can’t split at a vertex when the map reference differs from the feature reference in 3.4-3.6 because they messed up something in the new data model. This has taken a backseat to adding an AI agent to the tool search bar).
I use primarily arcpy in my work to interact with the design database and source data, but to get that into a usable state required me writing 3 wrapper libraries and becoming the #1 question answerer on their developer forums because apparently it’s just trash and no one cares. I’ll make recommendations with sample code and find out that they just straight up copy pasted my example into the codebase the following quarter.
I have loved my interactions with shapely and gdal systems though. Planning on modifying my libraries to use them as a fallback so I can try and have a unified interface for both systems.