[Qgis-developer] Re: Add QScintilla2 PyQt module to QGIS Distributions?

[Alex Mandel]

On 02/13/2012 01:30 AM, Alessandro Pasotti wrote:
> 2012/2/13 Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com>:
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:24 AM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
>>> Il 12/02/2012 23:15, Larry Shaffer ha scritto:
>>>
>>>> didn't want to break it trying out new ideas (i.e. start doing forks and
>>>> merges). It's my opinion that most new dvelopers won't even need it for most
>>>> small projects.
>>>
>>> -1: I think an SCM is a necessity, to speed up collaboration. E.g., in case
>>> of API breakage, a dev can go round all the plugins and fix them quickly,
>>> whereas waiting for all authors to understand and apply the fix can be very
>>> long.
>>
>> I share Larry's opinion - for a small one man show project SCM is not
>> necessary. Of course at some stage it is useful to introduce it.
>>
>> Regarding API breakage and fixing plugins by someone else - I do not
>> support that. Even though plugin code may be hosted at hub.qgis, only
>> the plugin author is the real owner of the code - it is not in public
>> domain. Therefore doing some changes without author's permission (and
>> releasing new version on his/her behalf) does not sound good to me.
> 
> 
> Martin, I couldn't agree more with you.
> 
> We've already seen all the troubles and confusion that were introduced
> by trying to push plugin authors to have a GIT instance on redmine, I
> would keep this as a soft suggestion (even softer than it is now),
> nothing more.
> 
> If an author doesn't want to maintain a public code repository it's
> his right to do it, and this is not a good reason for not hosting his
> plugins on plugins.qgis.org, IMHO we should implement other methods to
> evaluate the quality of a plugin, a voting system is already in the
> pipeline and could be implemented during the next code sprint in Lyon.
> 
> 

FYI, as soon as code is released as a Plugin it's GPL. That does mean
that anyone is allowed to take it change it and republish it, though
when republishing it would not be on behalf of the original author nor
would they necessarily endorse the release and in some cases need to
change the name if it's something Trademarked.

That said, it's not our 1st choice to make fixes in people's plugins. In
this scenario Hub was seen as a way to rescue abandoned plugins, one's
in which the author becomes unreachable or has not interest in working
on their code anymore. History has shown this to happen to some plugins
that are quite popular.

I'll state again, there is 0 requirement to host a plugin on hub. Anyone
can upload to plugins.qgis.org. As an FYI someone else may create a hub
project for you in order to allow the filing of tickets against your
plugin, but rarely would anyone create a repo for you unless the
community decides it's abandoned and wants to continue it's development.

Thanks,
Alex