I did two things, I grew up with hardcore mappers, photogrammetry, surveying, you gotta do it this way, NAD 27, we did that for a while. And when I left, I became an Esri business partner, so I did that for like four years. Mortgage my house to buy ArcInfo, yes.

19, 2006, 2007 when that happened. So, I dropped them, I was a trainer. I actually teach QGIS classes randomly now, off and on. David had to sit through one a while back.

I'm currently a business partner with Fulcrum, because that scratches my mobile data collection itch. I was at the Fulcrum live event yesterday, it was pretty good. So now I'm almost all open source. QGIS, PostGIS, I'm trying to learn a little bit about Map Server, and I sort of suck at PostGIS,

but I got hope, it's kind of fun. Sometimes Saturday nights I'll sit there and like, hey, let's see how many times I can screw this SQL statement up, a lot. And I had the joy of going with Rich's group, AppGeo, down to the Virgin Islands. And while I was down there, I worked with AppGeo and Spatial Focus, and I got off the plane,

Esri guy, and they said, hey, we're gonna do all this in PostGIS. Wasn't there some ramen foiled? There was after that, there was a lot. And so I walked down there with a laptop, no idea what PostGIS was, and no real clue what QGIS was, because they were using OpenJump.

OpenJump users? Yeah, there's at least one, sorta. Yeah, many years ago. And OpenJumps, if you had to read the manual, you didn't need to use it. Like I said, you didn't have a manual for a long time. And I discovered this wonderful thing called QGIS 174, which I think was raw claw at the time, or something.

It was a little bit rough around the edges, but functional. And so I came back, and I'm like, and I had a GIF here, and the GIF was the head pounding itself into the keyboard, but I went to PDFs and it didn't work. So I came back from that going,

hey, it's an open source thing. Like I sat down there and made data for six months, and as an Esri guy, I felt kinda dirty. Like, wow, I'm making GIS stuff, I'm doing analysis, I'm working, I'm building files, and it worked. So I come back and start changing things in the consulting business. And I started focusing more on data, because that was more important than software.

But, you know, I like the open source stuff. So people call me up all the time now. Four years ago, if you said open source, map server, you'd get some name recognition, queue just very little, post just none. Now you say it, and you can walk in just about anywhere

and go open source, QGIS or something, and everybody's heard of it. So there's not that clueless factor that you got four years ago. So I get called in to do a lot of weird and wild stuff, and I try to focus on the data part. I don't wanna delve into software. As one of the interesting things that I end up doing,

hillshaded LiDAR data, and this actually, let's see, is this gonna work on? Because you may not even see this. So this is not terribly far from my house. I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee River Gorge. Tennessee River comes down, cuts through the mountains, and it makes a very beautiful gorge.

This is actually all uphill. This is all downhill. The edge of the river's right here. I try not to zoom out too far, because Indian mountains. I got a call from the Tennessee River Gorge, and these are the kind of things that happen. We've found archeological stuff.

Can you help us make a map of it? And Tennessee had to release their LiDAR data for free, and I've got it, if you track it down later, there's actually walls that are cutting up from here. And if you look at the LiDAR data, the wall actually extends all the way up here, and it's a burial mound. And if you're on the ground, you can actually see the burial spots.

So fun stuff like that. That was fun. There's other things like, hey, help us make a map. Not so much fun. But my clients, so I'm a small business, do consulting, and you always run into people going, hey, I'd love to do consulting. It sounds awesome. It is, mostly.

But when you're doing the open source dance, you end up, and this year, I've really kind of categorized people into three spots in their life. So if you, in general, when people call me up, they fall into, hey, we bought Esri software, we don't know how to make it work. Why did you buy it?

Eh, they told us to. They being neighboring county, neighboring organization, salesperson, somebody. B, you call me up, and you go, hey, we have Esri software, and it's bleeding us dry. We are spending a ton of money that we shouldn't be spending. To give you examples, there's examples of counties around Atlanta that are spending a quarter of a million dollars a year

just on Esri licensing. That's a lot of people you could hire for a quarter of a million dollars a year just to maintain some data in a server environment, maybe push out a web map. The C people, we have nothing except a computer and a dream. And most of the time, they don't even have a good computer. They've just got a thing, like they got a laptop. And believe it or not, people like that will exist

when you're out working. You will run into people that have absolutely zero idea of what's going on. And to quickly summarize these three people, B, they're going back to Esri sales, and they're going, hey, this guy's gonna move us to open source, cut us a break. I'm never gonna hear out of them again.

I may hear next year when they're getting ready to pay their maintenance, but it happens. And I'll send them a quote. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time. I'm just gonna make a quote, send it to them, because I know what they're gonna do, and they run off. And so these guys are fun. The A, nothing works right. I don't know what I need to do. Just make it work.

Hey, I can make it work. Would you mind if I installed QGIS on here? What's QGIS? Don't worry about it. It's gonna work. I start the migration at that point, because once you shoehorn in QGIS, QGIS is my gateway drug, so I walk in, sprinkle it around, let them get a taste, and then we work from there.

The people that have absolutely nothing, that's a breeze. QGIS and postGIS, and we'll worry about the explanations later. They just need to get something working and get it installed. Generally, that's who I'm dealing with. Those are the three people. The people that fall into C are fascinating,

because they need GIS. Everybody, it's 2017. It's like not having a smartphone. My mom had a flip phone until last year, and it died, and she freaked out and had to get an Android phone. Mom, join us in 2010. Come on, get with us.

What will end up happening with A and with C, because B is just completely gone at this point, we start migrating. I don't necessarily wanna go in and kick Esri out the door. That's not my plan. It just happens that way, which is kinda nice, when it ends up happening.

They'll move to mix for a while. Mostly, they'll probably end up abandoning their Esri software at some point, just because this is working, it works well. As of late, Esri's been doing a hard sell. So I don't know if you guys ever deal with Esri sales currently. It's rough. They show up, make horrendous demands, selling ELA agreements.

They're wanting money. They gotta sell some software. They gotta get stuff done. I don't fault them for it. It's money. They got a job to do, but it's tough. When you're asking people to spend a lot of money, that they don't need to spend to manage GIS data. Doesn't need to happen that way. And it's a dance. You're dancing through this technology,

this GIS knowledge. And the one thing that kinda chafes me currently, spatial isn't special, it is. It's very special. The knowledge I have, the knowledge you have as GIS practitioners, it's very important. And we've gotten into this bad rut, running around saying spatial isn't special. And the software, anybody can grab it.

Anybody can start working with it. But you need to know what you're doing. You need to know why projections are there. Datums and things that are going on. And a lot of these people don't, they don't know. They don't understand it. But they've heard spatial isn't special. And so I do get a lot of, I get some flack from people that, you know, you go in and try to help,

and they go, well, you know, I heard a kid, I mean, it's computers. No, it's not. It's not exactly computers. You need to, you know, look at it a little bit different. So as an example of these people I deal with, we have a broken GIS. I have a forestry firm out of Dayton, Tennessee. Anybody know anything about Dayton, Tennessee?

Scopes Monkey Trial. That's where it happens. That's where the whole idea of evolution versus creationism played out in the small town in Dayton. If you ever end up there, you're probably lost. I mean, it's not out in the middle of nowhere, but it's an interesting area. I went in with a firm that had bought ArcGIS Basic,

which we would call ArcView. I still call it ArcView, and it's called, you know, Basic or Normal or whatever it's called. And we were struggling. I was trying to help them, and they had like 120 some odd shape files they were managing with ArcView and failing miserably. And their client was upset

because we couldn't make data delivery. So they didn't know what to do. And I'm like, give me a week. And I sat down and did a lot of Googling because that was my first dive into PostGIS. And I merged all these shape files back into like something like 20 tables. And we haven't had a problem since. It has reduced our maintenance from like 20 hours a month

or 40 hours a month down to five. It just works. They don't fully understand what I'm doing, but we went from one workstation to three workstations and we migrated a Office Depot cheap computer to a quote unquote database server. So it's working. You know, and we saved,

overall they were probably going to have to move to Arc server at some point. Like they were getting demanded for Arc editor or Arc server and we probably saved 20 some odd thousand dollars by PostGIS and QGIS. A breeze. They were tickled to death over that. I got a long-term client. Yay. Water utility. So these guys came up with Fulcrum.

The Fulcrum live event, they actually just flew up for the live event. They were very upset. They got a hard sell from Israel. You've got to buy Arc server. We want you to do an ELA because everybody in here needs Arc. Like everybody needs it. $50,000, $60,000, something they were getting sold. ArcGIS online.

It's a weird, wacky world if you haven't had to deal with that. Thank your lucky stars if you haven't had to deal with that. They were hard sold. You know, they had a hard sell coming in. You've got to do it this way. And they called me up. Hey, we've heard about this thing you're doing with this QGIS stuff. What do you, you think that'll work?

It'll work. Took them a year. Took them a year. Baby steps. It was like the Chapin, Chapin, what was the, I just went to the, now I can't remember the name of the group. University of Chicago. Yeah. University of Chicago, the Chapin, Chapin Hollow. They just, you know, they migrated off. Took them like a year and a half.

This water utility's been slowly migrating and they came up and asked them yesterday, how's it going? Because they're handling it themselves, which leads to some problems. There could be a few hiccups, but they're done. They're gonna, they may keep a copy of Arc, maybe. But that's up to them. I'm not gonna tell them to get rid of it or keep it.

But what I find, if I don't tell them anything, it's gone. So I'm pretty sure somewhere there's an Esri sales rep with my head on a, you know, darks being thrown at me. The people that have nothing are fascinating, once again. To give you guys an idea of the developers

and the people in the room that worked on this, I have a utility in Michigan and they have, these guys go out and lay fiber optic cable. They get excited about bulldozers and trenchers and things. Software, not so much. And they decided they needed a GIS

because Google Maps wasn't cutting it anymore for laying the utility lines on there. I didn't get a phone call until they had QGIS installed, post-GIS installed, and they had made a whole lot of data, a lot of data. And they got kind of hung up. They heard about views and joins and things, and QGIS was acting kind of wonky with them.

They didn't understand editing, so they called me up. Out of the blue. Phone interview. Hey, how do we make this work? What are you doing? Oh my God, you've done all of this? And the kicker right now is trying to normalize our database because you'd be amazed how many times you can misspell the word fiber.

Capital F, lower F. And normalizing your database, it freaks them out because you go, look, we just need this. Why are you putting numbers in here? Because you've misspelled fiber 15 times and it drives me crazy. And they're like, well, we're OK with that. You shouldn't be, you don't need to be.

And I gently push them along. They call me up. They're a quote unquote QGIS engineer, actual job title, calls me up. And he's a super smart guy, and I kind of push them along and keep them going. And they've never bought Arc. They don't want Arc. They just, they're happy with what they have. Abbot County in Georgia,

the problem with them, they want to do it all themselves. And they've got the soft, they can get the software, but they're completely hung up on the process themselves over the spatial aspects of it. And the interesting thing, I'm running flat with the Esri sales rep in the local college. The local college considers themselves an Esri business partner.

Why, they consider they're not, but they keep pushing. We need you to do it this way. But he's getting no support from them. And he called me up the other day kind of crying about it. I'm like, dude, I'm sorry, but I got things to do. I'm sorry. Call me when you want me to do something, but don't call me crying.

We got to fix. You just got to make the step. And he doesn't want to make the step. So, and the common pitfalls you run into. So if you're out consulting, you're talking to people. If I hear, if it's not Esri, it's not worth using one more time, I'm going to punch somebody. You hear that a lot when you're out traipsing the countryside. You run into people.

They don't understand it. They don't understand support. And you hear that like, I'm paying for support. What are you going to do? That's a Georgia accent, in case you guys wondered. The problem is, join the community. That's what you need to do. If you want support, be a part of the process. And they don't. Like, but I want to call somebody. Well, then call me. Just don't call me like after eight o'clock at night.

And I had a guy do that. Can I call you at two in the morning? No. You can if you pay me, but don't call me at two in the morning. A lot of times, you know, they don't value the geospatial process. Like I said, spatial is special. Maybe not so much from a software standpoint, but you know, knowledge is. The software can be a bit rough.

Man, I love QGIS. Like, I would get a QGIS tattoo if I could. Like, it weirds me out. Because I print out stickers. If you want a sticker, I print out stickers and they change the logo. That's why I don't want to get a tattoo. Because it may change after that. Man, the release schedule with QGIS is rough when you have clients. Especially if they don't want to be part of the community. Like, if they just see me as a resource,

I have to constantly tell them, upgrade your software. Luckily, some are on Linux, and it upgrades. You know, they get a notification. Does he upgrade? With the running Windows, I have people running 214.4 QGIS, which is horribly outdated at this point. But they just, oh, it works. You need to keep up. Come on, you're getting service packs.

You're getting people working. Come on, keep up. But it's hard. My biggest heartburn right now, Ubuntu GIS unstable. If you have used Ubuntu GIS, you've probably heard of the unstable repository. It's awesome. Nobody wants to use it because it's called unstable.

And then you have to explain, well, the Debian repository is considered unstable stable until it moves and they're just looking at you. Their eyes are glazing over and they're going, but it's called unstable. We don't want to use it. And I sent an email to the user's list. It got firmly rebuked for going, can we not rename this to something like fresh or current

or awesome or like change that name? And it's not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen. I wish it would. It would make my life. Because I'm getting people like 20, you're at two minutes, fudge.

Well, this side says five. Oh, okay. Oh, it's five. No, it's actually two? Yeah, but you're doing well. Oh, okay. Stay with me. Like 20 years ago, I'm running Unix. AML, Spark, Bash commands. I'm running Linux. Sitting there doing, Linux is making a comeback. The common victories,

I don't talk software and I don't talk hardware. People want to talk software all day. Well, what kind of box do we need to run our new the blah, blah, blah? Do you have something produced since Windows 7 came out? Yes, and then just, let's go. And then talk data. I don't talk software. They want to know about stuff. I'm like, look, QGIS, Postgres, don't worry about that.

What problems are you having here? Tell me about this. I don't want to know about all this other stuff. And we'll discuss it at some point, but just, you know, move along. And my fight, getting people into the community, they don't want to join. And it's hard getting them in. A couple hiccups, like I will get people,

sometimes I get people in the community, and my mom and dad, you know, mom will say the car's making a noise. My dad goes, good, I don't hear anything. Then the wheel falls off. You get a lot of people that report bugs. I have one lady, she reported a bug and the developers looked at it and went, oh, that's stupid, delete. She's still mad about that. It was a bad bug report, I saw it.

And I told her that. You gotta, bug reporting needs to be a little bit easier with QGIS. But that's just one of those things you work with when you're in the community. You know, support and help, and I want to help do that. Community, a lot of people say, well, you know, community's not support. It is support, get involved. You know, I'm scared to death to send an email to the post GIS list,

because I know somebody like Paul's gonna go, oh my God, what are you doing? It's called a select command. Or something crazy, and I'll go, oh, sorry. But, you know, you gotta do it. And where am I struggling as a business? I'm a small business. You know, I make 90% of my living off Fosport G. I can't code.

Like I said, get off my lawn hub. I can't handle it. I'm working with it. I just donated some stuff to the QGIS symbol repository. I want to contribute back financially. People pay for Esri software, and they pay a lot for support. They need to donate back to the project. And so I'm debating, do I enable a tax?

Hey, thank you for signing up. 250 bucks, and then turn around and donate that to the community. I don't know exactly how to handle that yet. I'm working on it. Do I hide it in my invoice somewhere as other? Or do I just go, hey, donation to the community. And just do it. I don't know yet. Because I've got a lot of people on QGIS,

and they're not contributing back to that. And they need to, but anyway. Conclusion, if you ever end up in that fix where you're going, hey, you need to move, talk data. Don't worry about the software. Software will fix itself. That discussion will happen. It's not us versus Esri so much,

but God, if you run into a salesperson, like, take a blade with you, because you might get stuck. I mean, it is with them. Not so much with the tech crowd. The tech guys at Esri are cool. The sales guys, it's kind of rough. A blade to a gunfight. Yeah, weigh your options going in.

Not that I'm suggesting gun violence or knife violence, because that would break the code of conduct. Yeah, we're joking. We're joking. But if you get a little bit in there, all you got to do is get QGIS in and just let it go. And once you get that in, it just spreads on its own. And then pretty soon, they're looking at Postgres, and they're looking at people love the word GeoServer.

If somebody had, like, freaking copyrighted GeoServer, and like every time you say it, you get a dollar, the number of people walk up to me and go, GeoServer, that would fix everything. And I'm like, so what is it? And they go, it's Geo and your server. And it's got to be awesome.

And you're like, you don't even know what it does. And they're like, well, it serves Geo stuff. And that's what somebody told me one time. OK. But anyway, I probably am close to running over. I'm being told not. Questions, angst, anger? Yeah. Awkward clapping, and then everybody just fall out of silence.

You know, I was just thinking, your experience as a GIS person and your belief that spatial is special. And the fact that we have about 1,100 people here at Postgres G, we think that's pretty darn good for this community. But Esri, at their use conference,

they claim they had 16,000 people. So how do you reconcile that with some of what you've been thinking about and talking about? Esri's a party. I had a bunch of friends go. And all they talked about when they came back, San Diego was awesome. The drinking was awesome. And what a party.

And they don't see this side of it. They don't see the discussion over the, I can go up to Paul Ramsey and go, dude, I need some help. And like, you can talk to a developer. At the Esri conference, the developers talk to you. They don't see that party yet. So a couple of my friends are floating around here that went to the Esri users conference. And they're going, this is completely different.

I like this. You just got to get them here. And that's the thing. They don't see an applicable, they see Esri as a giant party and they want to go to that. But this is a better party because there's better people. But isn't the data locked up in a different project? On the Esri side? Yes. Sometimes.

I mean, you can get it out, but it's that many more steps to get it out. No, it's not any more steps to get it out. You just have to get it out. It's pretty easy to get data out. I have less heartburn getting it out than trying to push it back into an Esri system. So if I can get it out, and you can get file-based geodatabases, just about everything, but SDE is a little bit

wonky a thing on that unit. Tell them to dump it to a shapefile. Oracle dumps a spatialite now, so you can go that route. Yeah? I just had a question. When you installed PostGIS, do you just do that on?

Yeah, I just loaded it in one spot. The worst thing that had to happen, we did that. We loaded it in one spot. Generally loaded it in one spot. I don't want everybody with their own version of PostGIS. I had one guy that swore up and down, he was going to use Dropbox as a server. And he said, that's going to manage my data. And I refused to work with him, because it

was going to explode at some point. Yeah, just in one place. That's it. Cool. When you say people are joining the QGIS community, do you mean about the mailing list, GIS Stack Exchange? Any of it. Yeah, just get involved somehow. Generally, the QGIS users list is my favorite way

to get involved. But it's a discussion there. Less friction for users, because I seem to hope people tend to not use it so much, and they are joining the Stack Exchange. Stack Exchange I don't like, because there's a little bit of angst on there.

People give you very short, kind of, I say smart ass answers sometimes. You don't get that on a QGIS users list. Everybody's nice. Even Linnea was nice to me. Not if people don't say thank you, or they don't like. Yeah, they have to be nice, so.

Rob, you talked a lot about converting people from the desktop. I'd agree to open source, if you can tell with anyone, or what's not hard to get, how hard to get, and what are you looking for to them? Portal, not so much. Some of the people aren't GIS online. The water utility that is getting

ready to burn their last art license needs a web map. And they were using RGS online, but they were using an unsecured free version. And so we're discussing with them like a web map. So that just, for me, that is just starting. So people are way down the road on web mapping. My clients don't deal with that. They don't want to push their data out.

So the first one just popped up. OK, Randy, you ready for this one? OK.