Seeking Free and Open Source GIS Desktop packages?

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http://freegis.org/ - the oldest and perhaps most comprehensive directory of free GIS software and projects.

Wikipedia has most of them listed

  • QGIS
  • uDig
  • OpenJump
  • gvSIG
  • TerraView
  • Kosmos
  • WhiteBox
  • MapWindow
  • GeoDa
  • If you consider Google Earth as a GIS application, Nasa's WorldWind is an open source alternative.
  • Epi-map, part of CDC's Epi-info epidemiology package, may be worth a look if you're in that line of work.
  • OpenMap's free too. UI's pretty old school though. I prefer qGIS or uDig.
  • QGIS supports native SAGA grid format so it is very easy to work with these two programs together and use advantages of both

I would look at OSGeo.org for this. They maintain a collection of Open Source GIS packages and utilities.

This includes:

  • GRASS
  • OSSIM
  • QGIS
  • gvSIG

In addition, there are many useful tools and libraries, such as GDAL, OGR, OpenLayers, etc.


Portable GIS is a very useful set of Open GIS Tools that can fit on a USB stick and used on other computers and very good for field work on a laptop. Great for beginners or students without the resources to purchase for commercial GIS products.

Newly updated version 2 contains a self-contained installer, updated versions of all the constituent software packages, a new control panel, and improved documentation.

"this idea was to provide beginners with a ready-installed and configured stack of open source GIS tools that would run in windows without the need for emulation or a live cd. "

The current set of software includes:

* Desktop GIS packages QGIS (with GRASS plugin), uDIG and gvSIG,
* FWTools (GDAL and OGR toolkit)
* XAMPPlite (Apache2/MySQL5/Php5),
* PostgreSQL (version 8.4)/Postgis (version 1.4),
* Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache, Featureserver, and Geoserver web applications.

(450MB download, and needs a USB stick of 2GB)

credit to Joanne Cook (archaeogeek) http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/portable-gis/

Archaeogeek migrated to Octopress 02Apr12 Portable GIS v2 updated link http://www.archaeogeek.com/portable-gis.html

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Software Recommendations

Open Source Gis

Desktop Gis

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