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.

Therefore, he decided to contact a QGIS core developer and paid around 600€ for a new feature. A duplicate selected grid button to easily duplicate existing grids. The feature was implemented and was available on the next QGIS regular release (3.40).

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At a rate of 25€ per hour (purely as an example value), the 34 hours would represent approximately 866€. So, in less than 1 year, Giovanni’s investment was fully paid by all the time the new feature has saved.

If he had a company with ten workers, doing the same operation, he would have a return on the investment in less than one month!! If he had 100 workers… well, you get my point. The more you use the feature, the faster it gets paid back.

But this tale is not over yet… We are talking about Open Source software. Therefore, this new tool, which have costed “someone” 600 euros, was now available to EVERYONE that uses QGIS. For free!! No strings attached, no licensing segregation.

So, imagine that QGIS is used daily by over 500.000 people (a conservative estimate IMHO) and that, say 0.1% of the users would save 20 minutes daily because of this new tool, that’s:

50.000 people x 20 min x 22 working days = 16.000 hour per Month!!

So, even at a very low rate of 1 Euro per hour, the 600€ is now worth 16.000 Euros every month!! (Obviously, the hourly rates vary much depending on each country’s salaries. In the US, for example, the GIS Analyst role salary ranges from around 19 to 35 Euros.)

The moral of this tale?

  1. Investing time and/or money on Open Source projects development can have almost immediate returns
  2. The impact of the investment go way beyond the original investor, reaching thousands of users worldwide who, for some reason, can’t make the same kind of investment, or simply decided to invest time or money on other QGIS improvements or other Open Source software they use.

If you have an idea for a QGIS feature or a bug fix that would make you and your collaborator’s life better, check the list of Core Contributors support companies that can help you implement it.

Finally, I would like to personally Thank all the Giovannis out there who regularly invest their time and/or money in improving Open Source Software that EVERYONE can freely use in their daily life.