While there's general acceptance across the globe that open source is the awesome (being always completely bug free and better in every single way!), sometimes organisations have external blockers which prevent them embracing their new open-source overlords with open arms.
One of these blockers is the unfortunate dominance of map styles locked up in that sad little prison of proprietary walls known as ""LYR"" and ""style"" files. The lack of any way to extract symbol styling from these formats prevents them being reused anywhere outside of the ESRI ecosystem... which is why searching for ""LYR to QML"" or ""LYR to SLD"" or ""LYR to CartoCSS"" just leads to heartbreak. For organisations with 1000's of custom styles implemented in LYR files, this represents a significant barrier to open source adoption.
In this lightning talk I'll run through the state of LYR file reverse engineering, what tools are available to work with these, and what work remains to be done.