[Qgis-developer] QTraffic: I would never accept a plugin that I'm author ; )

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Luigi


> On 02 Dec 2015, at 05:43, Luigi Pirelli <luipir at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi qgis devs
> 
> I just published the QTraffic plugin... It's a plugin developed for
> the Coimbra university (Portugal) that I finished some months ago.
> 
> I had ethical problem publishing it, because it contain a windows
> executable (the algorithm developed by the University team) that I'not
> able to verify directly.
> I worked to convince to publish the code since the beginning of the
> project, but because it's a research project they are still in
> experimental phase testing and calibrating it. So they don't want to
> have a "official" release of the code before to have it deeply tested.
> Deep testing depends of accessibility of the plugin, so I published it.
> During Gran Canaria hackfest I asked to some core developer if it was
> correct to publish it, and all give me the ok.
> I'm still not sure of this decision, and at least I want to be
> transparent about this.
> 
> I'm sincerely confident that the executable code (Fortran code) will
> be sooner or later published, what I don't know is when and in what
> form and with what license... but I'm confident that it will be a open
> license.
> 
> please ask more info or do pressure to the official code
> maintainer(s): qtraffic_support at uc.pt
> 

For my part I have concerns both from licensing and from exposing our users to potential harm point of view.

* In the first case (which is probably not as well defined) I don’t think it is good to ship code from the official repo where the licensing is indeterminate, and which potentially conflicts with QGIS licensing itself.
* In the second case, shipping a binary from the official repo gives us no opportunity to inspect the code to ensure that it is not doing something potentially harmful to the users computer.

My suggestion would be to publish it under a third party repo and encourage users to test it from there.

Regards

Tim



> Regards
> 
> Luigi Pirelli
> 
> **************************************************************************************************
> * Boundless QGIS Support/Development: lpirelli AT boundlessgeo DOT com
> * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luigipirelli
> * Stackexchange: http://gis.stackexchange.com/users/19667/luigi-pirelli
> * GitHub: https://github.com/luipir
> * Mastering QGIS:
> https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/mastering-qgis
> **************************************************************************************************
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Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee Member
tim at qgis.org




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