[Qgis-developer] Project quality discussion

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hello,

On 07/11/2015 00:08, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> On 7 Nov 2015 12:22 AM, "Hugo Mercier" <hugo.mercier at oslandia.com
> <mailto:hugo.mercier at oslandia.com>> wrote:
>> - if a company with no core developer wants to ensure a new feature is
>> accepted, it should pay another core developer for the reviewing part.
>> Ideally the money should go to the project and the project would decide
>> what core developer(s) to pay.
[..Snip.]

> It also means the entire project becomes 100% dependant on financing. At
> the moment a huge chunk (probably the majority) of QGIS work is
> volunteer or via non-funded contributions.

As far as I know this statement is totally wrong. The vast majority of
QGIS work is done via paid people during work hours. This is definitly
not volunteering, neither non-funded.
Some work may not be _directly_ funded, but it it still paid work :
researchers, consultant, people who develop plugins to help their jobs
may not be paid directly to do specific QGIS improvement. But all the
work they do on it is part of their global job.

They are indeed students, week-end programmers and other fully
benevolent volunteers who do a great job in QGIS, but it is IMHO very
far from being a majority.
And paying them to work on QGIS also is a way to value their work and
improve quality, not make the project $$$-dependant.

Vincent


> Couldn't this just be worked out by sponsored devs/companies on a case
> by case basis? Eg if timing is critical then line up a reviewer for
> speedy review prior to quoting for work and factor into their original
> quote the cost for this.
> 
> Nyall
> 
>>
>> - writing a QEP before adding a new feature is a good way to increase
>> its acceptance. But some people have to review it. We may come to the
>> same process to pay for QEP reviews.
>>
>> - at which point we rely on volunteer work is not yet clear. But the
>> current guess is: still too much. Having a better idea of the ratio
>> between free work and paid work would be profitable for the project: it
>> would allow to make clear what the reality of an open source project
>> like QGIS is and that too much free work is not sustainable. Paolo's
>> mail is about that. The goal is to (begin to) separate clearly what is
>> the part of free work and the part of paid work in the project.
>>
>> - see on the PSC side if it is possible to pay some people to handle
>> global maintenance : PR triage, reviews, small bug fixes and so on. It
>> does not have to be only one developer.
>>
>> Thanks for participating in this discussion.
>>
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> 
> 
> 
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