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Hi Tim,<br>
<br>
This looks really good to me!<br>
<br>
Thanks you for taking the time to write this article<br>
Matthias<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 04/21/2016 07:23 AM, Tim Sutton
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:65AB0BCF-BC5A-4F72-9189-CBC8EF88D29F@qgis.org"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
Hi all
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">Following a suggestion by Richard I have been
drafting an article for the QGIS blog about how companies can
approach building services around QGIS in a sensitive way. I am
inlining my first draft (I haven’t taken an editorial re-read of
it yet). Do others agree with the general sentiments laid out
here and are you happy for me to post it? Also if you have other
good points to raise please let me know.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">———— copy starts —————————</div>
<div class="">
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Over the years, QGIS has gained more functionality,
more users and more people and organisations who make their
livelihood from it. As an Open Source project, there are two
things that we value most highly:</p>
<ol class="" style="color: rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family:
Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;
font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
<li class="">Our community of project contributors</li>
<li class="">Our community of users</li>
</ol>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">The two groups are intermingled, co-dependent and
indispensable to the project. As both these groups have grown,
our reach has grown. Now as a project we touch the lives of
(by best estimation) hundreds of thousands of users and
contributors around the world.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">It is a natural consequence of such reach that QGIS has
become an attractive platform for companies on which to build
service based business models to their customers. From this
rises the advent of 'enterprise' offerings - service packages
tailored for large corporate and government institutions which
need service level agreements, guaranteed turn around times,
helpdesk support and so on. As a volunteer driven, grass roots
project we are not in the position and do not have the
interest in catering to this class of user base - it is far
better taken care of through third party service
providers that have the infrastructure and legal means to set
up such service offerings. </p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">As the momentum grows around such enterprise services
it is probably an inevitable consequence that tension may
arise between third party service providers and the QGIS core
project.In simplistic terms this tension can be seen as the
dichotomy between those of us who view our work on QGIS as a
labour of love versus those who see it their work around QGIS
as a labour of commercial enterprise.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">The reality is that much like the relationship between
project contributors and our community of users, there is a
huge amount of potential symbiosis between the QGIS developer
community and the growing number of value added resellers
providing services around QGIS: many of the improvements, bug
fixes and other enhancements produced by value added resellers
make their way back into the core QGIS offering, whilst the
body of work produced by the community of QGIS project
contributors becomes the basis around which value added
resellers build their marketplace offering.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Over the years we have tried to be sensitive to the
fact that many people rely on QGIS for their livelihood -
initiatives such as our Long Term Release programme, the
creation of test suites and heavy investment of donated
project funds into bug fixing (among many other similar
initiatives) have all gone a long way to making QGIS a viable
platform for value added resellers. We would like to ask that
resellers give the QGIS project similar consideration in their
marketing and work endeavours. As such I would like to present
a few simple guidelines below that you should use as guiding
principles in your interaction with the QGIS project. I will
use a hypothetical company 'ACME Corp.' in my examples below: </p>
<hr class="" style="cursor: default; border: 0px; height: 1px;
margin: 8px 0px; background-color: rgb(200, 215, 225); color:
rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times
New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px;">
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Keep us in the loop</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">There is so much going on around the QGIS project we
often get surprised by things people do. More often than not
it is a pleasant surprise but sometimes it isn't. If you are
planning some big new feature or creating a new service around
QGIS, I highly recommend that you share it with the community
early in your planning process. In particular for the case of
new features that you would like to see in the main code base,
coming along with an ACME Corp. 10,000 line code contribution
with no prior consultation creates ample room for friction.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Don't present your work as our work</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">It seems obvious, but many miss the nuance here. If you
wrote a marvellous plugins to count sheep in farm fields
because it will add great value to your customers, call it
'ACME. Corp sheep counter', not 'QGIS Sheep Counter'</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Don't present our work as your work</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">This is the corollary to the above. Our community works
incredibly hard to make QGIS, the web site, the documentation,
triage bugs, provide help on the mailing lists and forums. All
that effort can be disregarded in a single line of careless
copy like '<em class="">QGIS by ACME Corp. is the next best
thing since sliced cheese</em>'. Show a little love to the
people that built the platform for your service offering and
refer back to the parent QGIS project and it's community as
the progenitor of all the goodness you are sharing with your
clients. That does not denigrate the valuable service that you
provide your customers and it lets them know that you
represent your company and work fairly and contribute back to
the source project that you are basing your services on.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Friends don't fork</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Forking in Open Source is the process by which you
create your own divergent copy of the software and maintain
it independently, often resulting in two incompatible versions
(at the source code level) of the same project. Nobody really
wins from that. Your customers lose the ability to migrate
projects, workflows, knowledge between the community
maintained version of QGIS and your modified one. Your
developers get stuck in a one directional highway which takes
them further and further away from the original code base and
any opportunity to capitalise on the work of other
contributors from the QGIS community. In reality forking is
normal (its the standard workflow in GitHub for example), but
I really am referring to the process whereby you create an
heavily diverged copy of the source code.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Don't rebrand</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Every few months I get an email from a value added
service provider asking me if I can help them produce a
version of QGIS which is rebranded as 'ACME Corp. GIS'. By
rebranding here I mean deep rebranding - not just replacing
the splash screen (which I am generally OK with), but changing
the word 'QGIS' everywhere in the source code and user
interface to 'ACME Corp. GIS'. Beyond the fact that you
instantly break all sorts of things like QGIS project file
support, you also create a fork that will require massive
amounts of maintenance to keep in sync with the upstream
project.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Integrate your team with the QGIS
community</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">One great way to give your clients a good service and
to ensure your work is well accepted is to integrate your
developers with the QGIS community. By that I mean let them
subscribe to our mailing lists, participate in architecture
and other discussions, fix issues, contribute code, attend our
6 monthly hackfests and generally be part of the ebb and flow
of the project. There are so many benefits to doing this -
both to QGIS and yourself - which is probably evidenced by the
fact that the most well known QGIS value added service
providers each have a number of developers participating in
the community. My main motivation above all other reasons is
that they will gain the sensitivity to know how to get your
improvements integrated into the code base, and the trust and
camaraderie of the other community members which is great when
the time comes that they need help solving problems.</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Integrate your work with the QGIS code
base</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Whenever you are thinking about new features for your
clients, I encourage you to think about how to make them
generic enough that they can be incorporated into the main
code base. Once you do that, you have an automatic delivery
platform of your work to your users. QGIS has a well
established release routine and the features shipped with QGIS
get tested and used by many thousands of users. Besides you
are benefitting from the features others are funding, why not
pay the same complement back?</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><strong class="">Don't only contribute code</strong></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">For some reason coders are treated as the main hero's
in the story of an Open Source project. Many people overlook
the fact that there is a far larger team of translators,
document writers, sys admins, authors, artists, testers and
enthusiasts who contribute a massive amount of effort into the
project. When you are thinking about how to contribute back to
the project, take a moment to think about all the
infrastructure around the project and how you might help that
along along with the cool new features you plan to contribute
to the code base.</p>
<hr class="" style="cursor: default; border: 0px; height: 1px;
margin: 8px 0px; background-color: rgb(200, 215, 225); color:
rgb(61, 89, 109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times
New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15px;">
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><br data-mce-bogus="1" class="">
</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">There are many other things that you can do to
integrate yourself into the community, but my real point in
this article is that although QGIS is Free Software, it is not
made for free. Many people have put a lot of sweat equity into
QGIS and the only reward they get for their work (if they are
lucky) is recognition and appreciation. Think of them when you
build services on top of QGIS and find ways to acknowledge and
motivate them!</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Here's looking forward to seeing many thousands of
people making their livelihood by offering services around
QGIS!</p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);"><img apple-inline="yes"
id="6DDBB3F4-1143-4A15-BAE9-7C7434C53B97" apple-width="yes"
apple-height="yes"
src="cid:part1.09050500.03060607@opengis.ch" class=""
height="191" width="336"></p>
<p class="" style="margin: 0px 0px 24px; color: rgb(61, 89,
109); font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman',
Times, serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255,
255);">Tim Sutton</p>
<div class="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109);
font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times,
serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(QGIS
Project Chair)</div>
</div>
<div class="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109);
font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times,
serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><br
class="">
</div>
<div class="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgb(61, 89, 109);
font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times,
serif; font-size: 15px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">——————
copy ends -------------</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
<div class=""><img apple-inline="yes"
id="519E8CC2-0FE9-4F55-9B90-E07B60C85DE4" apple-width="yes"
apple-height="yes"
src="cid:part2.04020808.05080102@opengis.ch" class=""
height="65" width="59">
<div class="" style="font-variant-ligatures: normal;
font-variant-position: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal;
font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian:
normal; line-height: normal; word-wrap: break-word;
-webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break:
after-white-space;">
<div class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
---</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><b class="">Tim Sutton</b></div>
<div class="">QGIS Project Steering Committee Chair</div>
<div class=""><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:tim@qgis.org" class="">tim@qgis.org</a></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" style="color:
rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;
font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal;
letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start;
text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal;
widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width:
0px;">
</div>
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<pre wrap="">_______________________________________________
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc</a></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Matthias Kuhn
OPENGIS.ch - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.opengis.ch">https://www.opengis.ch</a>
Spatial • (Q)GIS • PostGIS • Open Source</pre>
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