[Qgis-developer] Announcing the release of QGIS 2.8 'Wien'

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

QGIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System
that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows.

We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.8 'Wien'.
Wien is German for 'Vienna' - host city to our developer meet up in November
2009 and again in March 2014.


Long Term Release

This is a special release since it is designated an 'LTR' (Long Term Release).
LTR releases will be supported with backported bug fixes for one year, and will
be in permanent feature freeze (i.e. no new features will be added, only bug
fixes and trivial updates).

The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing
platform for enterprises and organisations that do not want to deal with
updating user skills, training materials etc. more than once per year. The
success of the LTR is very much down to you, our beloved users - we need your
support to help funding bug fixes and making sure in your support contracts
with support providers specify that any bug fixes done on your behalf are
applied to the LTR branch as well as our normal development branch.

If an LTR is important to you, please consider also directly supporting the
QGIS project, or encourage your commercial provider to use LTR as a basis for
your enterprise solution so that everyone may benefit from a stable platform
that is being continuously improved and refined. Note that for users and
organisations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly
releases will continue unabated.


New Features

QGIS 2.8 is also a special release because it includes so many great new
features, tweaks and enhancements to make the most popular Free desktop GIS
even more feature filled and useful.  Visit the visual changelog that
highlights some of the new additions
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog28/index.html).

Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of
new bugs - if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a
ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker (http://hub.qgis.org/).  Please consult the
existing and closed issues there before filing any new ones.

The source code and binaries for Windows, Debian and Ubuntu are already
available via the large download link on our home page (http://qgis.org/).
More packages will follow as soon as the package maintainers finish their work.
Please revisit the page if your platform is not available yet.


Thanks

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many
folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so).

From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate
time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please
wander along to http://qgis.org and lend a hand!

Finally we would like to thank our official sponsors for the invaluable
financial support they provide to this project:

Gold Sponsor:
 Asia Air Survey, Japan (http://www.asiaairsurvey.com/)

Silver Sponsors:
 Sourcepole AG, Switzerland (http://www.sourcepole.com/)
 State of Vorarlberg, Austria (http://www.vorarlberg.at/)
 Office of Public Works, Ireland, Ireland (http://www.opw.ie/)

Bronze Sponsors:
 www.molitec.it, Italy (http://www.molitec.it/)
 www.argusoft.de, Germany (http://www.argusoft.de/)
 www.openrunner.com, France (http://www.openrunner.com/)
 GKG Kassel,(Dr.-Ing. Claas Leiner), Germany (http://www.eschenlaub.de/)
 Customer Analytics, USA (http://www.customeranalytics.com/)
 Urbsol, Australia (http://www.urbsol.com.au/)
 MappingGIS, Spain (http://www.mappinggis.com/)
 Lutra Consulting, UK (http://www.lutraconsulting.co.uk/)
 ADLARES GmbH, Germany (http://www.adlares.com/)
 Avioportolano Italia, Italy (http://www.avioportolano.it/)
 Faculty of Geology, Geophysics and Environmental Protection, AGH, University
   of Science and Technology, Poland (http://www.wggios.agh.edu.pl/en/)

A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small
to the project can be seen on our donors list
(http://qgis.org/en/site/about/sponsorship.html#list-of-donors).

If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please visit our
sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly
developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts
(http://qgis.org/en/site/about/sponsorship.html#sponsorship).

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it
- in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what
your financial or social status is - we believe empowering people with spatial
decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain
project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.


Happy QGISing!

Regards,

The QGIS Team!

-- 
Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden             http://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode                         
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