[QGIS-Developer] Bug #21460?

Tue Apr 9 10:00:00 PDT 2019

Hi Andrea,

As always, I agree with you, but one thing:

 > After all, the GPL license is really clear on the matter: "THE ENTIRE 
RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. 
SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY 
SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION"  Throwing one's frustration at the 
developers that shared code under the above conditions, while somehow 
understandable, really does not make sense and helps nobody.

To be fair you get the exact same conditions if you throw six digit sums 
to the proprietary vendors too. FME (https://www.safe.com/legal/fme-sla/):

"Limited Warranty: the Software is provided “AS IS” and with all defects 
and errors. ... TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, SAFE 
SOFTWARE MAKES NO OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AS TO 
MERCHANTABILITY, USE OF REASONABLE SKILL AND CARE, OR FITNESS FOR ANY 
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. WITHOUT LIMITING THE GENERALITY OF THE FOREGOING, 
SAFE SOFTWARE ASSUMES NO LIABILITY FOR DAMAGE TO ANY SYSTEM ON WHICH 
THIS SOFTWARE IS INSTALLED, FOR CORRUPTION OF ANY DATA TRANSLATED BY THE 
SOFTWARE, OR FOR LOSSES ARISING IN THE EVENT THIRD PARTIES ARE ABLE, FOR 
ANY REASON, TO USE OR ACCESS THE SOFTWARE OR YOUR DATA OR SERVICES 
WITHOUT CHARGE."

ESRI 
(https://assets.esri.com/content/dam/esrisites/en-us/media/legal/ma-translations/english.pdf)

"3.3 General Disclaimer. Except for the express limited warranties set 
forth in this Agreement, Esri disclaims all other warranties or 
conditions of an kind, whether express or implied, including but not 
limited to, warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a 
particular purpose, ... Esri does not warrant that Esri Offerings or 
Customers operation of the same will be uninterrupted, error free, fault 
tolerant, or failsafe *or that all nonconfirmities can or will be 
corrected*..."

(my bold at the end). Pretty much every software license ever says "this 
software won't necessarily do what you've paid for it to do".

The only real difference is that with FOSS, you /can /pay to get it 
fixed. With proprietary, even paying isn't a guarantee (Esri explicitly 
say so as you can see in my bold).

Cheers,

Jonathan

On 2019-04-09 10:57, Andrea Aime wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 9, 2019 at 10:26 AM Richard Duivenvoorde <rdmailings at duif.net>
> wrote:
>
>> I think Geoserver does a good job:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/geoserver/geoserver/wiki/Successfully-requesting-and-integrating-new-features-and-improvements-in-GeoServer
>> And Ian's talk: (though it can maybe be polished a little):
>> https://www.ianturton.com/talks/foss4g.html#/how-to-earn-support
>
> Hi there!
> Chiming in as this is an interesting conversation and it's relevant to
> pretty much any "mature" open source project (the kind that has
> developers that are a bit older, with a family and a job, and very little
> and precious spare time).
>
> What I wrote in the first article above should really be reworded to cover
> not just features and improvements, but also bug fixes.
> As others say, the reality is simple and "hard", core developers have
> already a day job, that normally involves following up on contract work,
> or project work, but not fixing random bugs for free, regardless of how
> important they are.
>
> Sure, there are bug fix code sprints, and there is a bit of spare time, but
> both are time constrained and volunteer based,
> that puts some simple filters on top of those activities: one does whatever
> fixing fits the time allocated for the bug fixing, and
> tries to fix as many as possible. Meaning, there is a tendency to pick the
> quick to solve tickets, starving anything else that requires
> longer development (or maybe longer setup), or just anything that one
> guesses might be complicated (e.g., found in a area of
> code that is known to be fragile).
> The volunteer bit puts another filter on what gets done, given a choice of
> hundreds of reports, one tends to choose stuff that
> they feel comfortable working with. Personally, given two equally viable
> tickets, I also tend to choose ones that are reported by
> people that are actively participating, and skip/delay the ones that have
> been reported by people that have been troublesome in the community.
>
> Users might call this unfair. I say they don't understand a thing about
> community driven open source... because it's not a faceless
> service like, dunno, healthcare (which one has paid taxes for btw), open
> source developers are people, not machines, and the free bug fixing
> is a courtesy, not a service. As far as I'm concerned, those that do not
> understand that or cannot live with it, can go back using proprietary
> software, it's a better match for them (really, open source is not just for
> everybody, even users need to have the right attitude towards it).
>
> I use a lot of open source software myself. When something does not work, I
> report. If I can help fixing, I do. If I cannot help fixing, I wait.
> If I cannot wait nor pay, I look for an alternative. After all, the GPL
> license is really clear on the matter:
> "THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH
> YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL
> NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION"
> Throwing one's frustration at the developers that shared code under the
> above conditions, while somehow understandable, really does not make sense
> and helps nobody.
>
> I would like to see some "summary" document of sort shared at the OSGeo
> level, as several projects have the same issues.
>
> Cheers
> Andrea
>
> == GeoServer Professional Services from the experts! Visit
> http://goo.gl/it488V for more information. == Ing. Andrea Aime @geowolf
> Technical Lead GeoSolutions S.A.S. Via di Montramito 3/A 55054 Massarosa
> (LU) phone: +39 0584 962313 fax: +39 0584 1660272 mob: +39 339 8844549
> http://www.geo-solutions.it http://twitter.com/geosolutions_it
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