We recently began a corporate sponsorship for the QGIS project, the canonical open source desktop GIS. I got back into doing some casual cartography work using QGIS back in December after a years-long hiatus of using it much (I don’t get to do much actual work with data these days). Bill wrote up a quick post about how we rely on it every day in our work:

As a Mac shop, the availability of a sophisticated, high-quality, powerful desktop GIS that runs natively on MacOS is important to us. QGIS fits that bill and more. With its powerful native capability and its rich third-party extension ecosystem, QGIS provides a toolset that would cause some proprietary software, between core applications and the add-on extensions needed to replicate the full power of QGIS, to cost well more than a QGIS sponsorship.

The team over at Lutra Consulting, along with the rest of the amazing developer community around QGIS have been doing fantastic work building a true cross-platform application that stacks up against any other desktop GIS suite.