[OSGeo-Discuss] OGC certification fees - Is there a common agreement with OSGeo

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi all,

During the last two years, I have been in running the official
certification process for QGIS.org and QGIS server.

We have certified [0] QGIS server for WMS 1.3 and more recently the OGC
APIF 1.0.

Up to now, the OGC team has been very helpful by kindly giving us the
reference implementation status, which implies no fees to pay.

But this changed just now with a more strict policy - see the response
below [4] - which ends up in having to pay 300 euros for each
certification process and yearly renewal process.

QGIS.org could eventually afford this budget, but I'm not sure smaller
OSGeo project can.

Furthermore, this manual process is already time consuming, a bit
bureaucratic,  and given that we run continuous integration with OGC
compliance tests [1], we will probably not struggle to get certified so
often under these new conditions. That is a bit sad since open source
really go together with public standards.

Do we have any agreement at the OSGeo level that would ease this part ? 
(I checked the wiki [2] first of course)


Thanks for your inputs,

Best regards

Régis

---

President of the french local Chapter / QGIS contributor


[0]
https://www.ogc.org/resource/products?display_opt=1&org_match=QGIS.org%20(OSGEO%20project)

[1] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/38644

[2] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OGC_Certification_Services


[4]

On 22/10/2020 11:25, Gobe Hobona wrote:
> We appreciate the work done by the QGIS and OSGeo community in
> supporting OGC standards. Please note however that we are guided by
> our policies, agreed on by the OGC Membership.
>
> Please see Sections 5.5 and 6.3 of the Compliance Testing Policy
> [https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=55234].
>
> The fee is only waived for:
>
> * The first three implementations to pass 100% of the compliance
> procedure, while the test is in beta. We refer to these as Early
> Implementers.
> * The first two Reference Implementations that pass the test related
> to a conformance class within a version of an Implementation Standard.
>