2 Open source spatial software
Why should you use open source software for GIS and spatial statistics? Beyond the question of licensing costs, open source changes how scientific software is developed, shared and used. In this lecture, we explore the communities behind tools such as R, QGIS, Python and GRASS GIS, and discuss why open source software is particularly valuable for reproducible spatial analysis. We will also look critically at the trade-offs: open source tools may sometimes have less polished interfaces or more decentralised documentation and support, but they provide access to software, algorithms and knowledge that can be shared, inspected, extended and reused by everyone.
Content to be developed.
Why use open source software?
Example of QField development
Overview of open source GIS tools
QGis
GRASS
R: sf, terra, (sp, raster)
Python: rasterio, geopandas
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