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Giovanni Had an Itch... an Open Source Development Tale

Once upon a time, there was a man called Giovanni (totally fictional name, by any means related to NaturalGIS’s CEO and Open Source advocate, Giovanni Manghi). He was a daily QGIS power user and he loved the software, but he had an itch… Something was troubling him. As any other main character of the traditional tales, instead of looking away, he decided to accept the quest and solve it. This itch of his was about the QGIS layout grids. It used to take Giovanni about 10 minutes to create a nice grid for a map layout, and then, another 20 minutes to replicate it a few times for different scales with small variations. If he had to do this operation one or two times every week, at the end of the year, he would have lost up to 34 hours of his precious and very limited time.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024 | 3 minutes Read
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QGIS Features I long for while using ArcGIS

(aka Features that ArcGIS Desktop users might not know that exists) From time to time, I read articles comparing ArcGIS vs QGIS. Since many of those articles are created from an ArcGIS user point of view, they invariably lead to biased observations on QGIS lack of features. It’s time for a QGIS user perspective, so bare with me on this (a bit) long, totally and openly biased post. "Hello, my name is Alexandre, and I have been using... [QGIS](http://www.qgis.org)" This is something I would say at an anonymous QGIS user therapy group. I’m willing to attend one of those because being recently and temporally forced to use ArcGIS Desktop again (don’t ask!), I really really really miss QGIS in many ways.

Thursday, January 28, 2016 | 11 minutes Read
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Open Source, why?

During my professional and personal life, I have worked with much different software, with all kinds of licenses. Most of them would be proprietary, closed and / or commercial code. So why devote my time and learning “exclusively” to Open Source? Without going into detail about the differences between open source software and free software, there are several reasons why FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) interest me. The first is obviously freedom. Be free to use the software in any context and for any purpose, without being limited by the costs of software acquisition and / or the rules and conditions imposed by the manufacturer (as many said free (as beer) software do). That allows me to, for example, familiarize myself with its features without having to use piracy, or, as a freelancer worker, develop my work based on my technical capacities rather than my financial ones.

    Sunday, March 31, 2013 | 2 minutes Read
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    Welcome note

    The blog “GIS Unchained” have borne devoid of any grandiose aspirations. The main objective will be to register my experiences with Open Source software while addressing challenges related to geographic information systems (GIS), spatial analysis, cartography and everything else that it might entail. Following the same principle of openness and sharing of the open source, I hope that these records can help others who, like me, “venture” into this world.

      Tuesday, March 26, 2013 | 1 minute Read