[Qgis-developer] Announcing the release of QGIS 2.14 'Essen'

[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 2.14 'Essen'.  Essen was
the host city to our developer meet ups in October 2012 and 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). Note that we are in discussion to extend the term
of our LTR releases to two years, but for technical reasons we will not do this
until QGIS 3.2.

The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing
platform for enterprises and organizations 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
organizations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly
releases will continue unabated.

New Features in QGIS 2.14 'Essen'

If you are upgrading from QGIS 2.8 (our previous LTR version) you will find a
great many new features in this release.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog214/)

We encourage you to peruse the changelogs for the intermediate non LTR 2.10 and
2.12 releases as this QGIS 2.14 includes all features published in those
releases too.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog212/)
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog210/)

Note that 2.14 first enters the regular package repositories and will not
immediately replace 2.8 in the LTR package repositories. That will happen when
2.16 is released.

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)

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 qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have
made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our
donors list.  If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please
visit our sponsorship page for details.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/about/sponsorship.html)

Current Sponsors of QGIS:

 SILVER AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland
 SILVER Sourcepole AG, Switzerland
 SILVER GAIA mbH, Germany
 SILVER Office of Public Works, Flood Risk Management and Data Management
        Section, Ireland
 SILVER Land Vorarlberg, Austria
 BRONZE 2D3D.GIS, France
 BRONZE Cawdor Forestry, United Kingdom
 BRONZE ChameleonJohn, United States
 BRONZE Chartwell Consultants Ltd.
 BRONZE Dr. Kerth + Lampe Geo-Infometric GmbH, Germany
 BRONZE Gaia3D, Inc., South Korea
 BRONZE GeoSynergy, Australia
 BRONZE GFI - Gesellschaft für Informationstechnologie mbH, Germany
 BRONZE GKG Kassel, (Dr.-Ing. Claas Leiner), Germany
 BRONZE HostingFacts.com, Estonia
 BRONZE Lutra Consulting, United Kingdom
 BRONZE MappingGIS, Spain
 BRONZE Nicholas Pearson Associates, United Kingdom
 BRONZE QGIS Polska, Poland
 BRONZE Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, United Kingdom
 BRONZE TerreLogiche, Italy
 BRONZE Trage Wegen vzw, Belgium
 BRONZE Urbsol, Australia
 BRONZE WhereGroup GmbH & Co. KG, Germany

Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain
project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current
sponsors is provided below - our very great thank you to all of our sponsors! 

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. If
you are able to support QGIS, you can donate.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/donations.html)


Happy QGISing!

Regards,

The QGIS Team!
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