Quantum GIS (or in short QGIS) started out as a simple GIS viewer. But it has seen an incredible growth in functionality, especially in the last few years. It is still very simple to use, making it an attractive tool for the casual user who just want to have a look at some maps. At the same time, it incorporates enough functionalities, thanks to the many high quality plug-ins, to cater for the more demanding user, whether it is for spatial analysis or creating visually attractive maps.
This blog shows how the author, Nathan, used the open source tool Gourse to create a very nice visualization of the growth of the QGIS code base. It is a video showing about 8 years of QGIS development in just over 9 minutes. See below a link to the video on Youtube.
Direct link to the video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NILKRiMtcU
Ecostudies 