[QGIS-Developer] Copyright in a plugin?or idea?

[Jonathan Moules]

Ideas cannot be copyrighted and that's just fine - ideas are a dime a 
dozen; everyone has them all the time. But few people ever implement them.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue - these were implemented so 
ideally should not have been duplicated? And not once but twice for a 
single author. This isn't something you want at the best of times, let 
alone on a resource constrained project like QGIS.

I guess there may be many reasons, and I won't second guess the authors 
here, but it seems that the first thing that should be done before any 
new component/plugin is worked on is to see if there's already one out 
there, and if there is, even if it's dated, try and contact the author. 
Maybe it can be built on, maybe it's a flaky pile of junk, but it only 
takes 10 minutes and may save days/weeks of duplicating work. Maybe it's 
also worth asking on the dev list if anyone has done something to this 
effect previously (I see such posts fairly often here already...).

(Full disclosure - I've recreated the wheel a few times for my own 
projects accidentally).

Just my 2p,

Cheers,

Jonathan


On 2019-10-04 08:01, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> Hola Francisco,
>
> On 02/10/19 13:56, Fran Raga wrote:
>> ____
>> Recently I found out about this
>> plugin https://github.com/qgist/toolbargenerator, which was presented in
>> the FOSS4G 2019 Bucharest. What surprised me is that this plugin has
>> EXACTLY the same functionality as mine, implemented for QGIS
>> 3  https://github.com/All4Gis/CustomToolBar , which I developed without
>> any funding.____
> thanks for pointing this out. I understand your frustration, but I think
> these things are more or less unavoidable, and in the long term are not
> a serious issue - time will select the best solutions.
> from a different point of view, we would really like not to have
> duplication in our plugin list, as th; I regularly ask in this case to
> seriously evaluate the opportunity for a merge. Could this apply also here?
> Cheers, and thanks for sharing.