We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.18 ‘Las Palmas’. The city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was the location of our autumn 2015 developer meeting.

This is the last release in the 2.x series. The current Long Term Release (LTR) remains version 2.14.x. This release provides incremental improvements over our previous release. The majority of activity is currently focused towards the development of QGIS 3.0 which is our next generation release planned for the end of the first quarter of 2017.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below – our very great thank you to all of our sponsors!

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.