[QGIS-Developer] QGIS Server and the Grants programme

Tue Jun 9 02:10:51 PDT 2020

Hi Jonathan, 

Rest assured - the majority of QGIS funds is already (and has always
been going) into bug fixing. Again - both Desktop and server users
benefit from that bug fixing. 

We publish our financial reports here:
https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/finance/index.html 

If you look into the 2019 report, you can see that around 50% of our
funds go into bug fixing and quality assurance (in some years even
more). Only about 10% of our funds went into the grants in 2019. And
from these grants, server received a small fraction. So, the absolute
amounts of investments that QGIS.ORG invests into QGIS sever is really
negligible. 

Most investments done in QGIS server go directly from clients to QGIS
development companies - and that has nothing to do with QGIS.ORG 

If you talk about the number of users of a server installation - I think
this is debateable: if you only count the admin of a server (regardless
of which server), then the numbers are low - no matter if we talk about
ArcGIS server, Geoserver, UMN, QGIS, etc. But every server easily has a
hundred or sometimes several thousand users who use these services -
don't you think. If I look at our small province - we have maybe 100
QGIS desktop users, but certainly several thousand users who use our
Web-GIS and OGC services - don't you agree? And our services integrate
with a lot of other applications that are vital to a province level
government. So in this perspective, (QGIS)-server installations need to
be multiplied with some factor to compare it with QGIS desktop user
numbers. 

Andreas 

On 2020-06-09 10:38, Jonathan Moules wrote:

> Hi Andreas, (& All),
> A fair point, but I believe this is an important point and this year I do have data to back up my point; in fact the grant program is what motivated me to finally get around to doing this analysis.
> 
> It seems from the replies that while there are a few differentiators, the key one is indeed cartography and styling. (There's also an interesting conversation about vectors going on there too). Some thoughts:
> * The vast majority of WMS/WMTS layers are not cartographically complicated, let alone beautiful. They're "here is a layer with small green points for trees", and "this polygon represents conservation areas". You can easily play around and see what's out there here: http://www.geoseer.net/api-demo/
> * WFS/WCS can't be styled server side.
> * It seems like overkill to create and maintain an entire server distribution that fundamentally only solves one (relatively simple compared to what QGIS Desktop can do) problem.
> * Rendering is only one part the QGIS package (Analysis, digitisation, management, etc.).
> 
> If I'm honest, the "competition" on this point isn't really between QGIS and MapServer/GeoServer. It's really between QGIS and ArcGIS. Because ArcGIS does exactly what QGIS Server seeks to do: offer a single integrated solution for Desktop-> Server. And certainly ArcGIS Server does have a huge number of deployments (53%), however again, there really aren't many cartographically complicated outputs on there. And despite the huge number of deployments, most services and datasets are actually served by MapServer/GeoServer (about 60% of datasets between them!). Basically ArcGIS is deployed by local government and used for bitty-stuff ("here are our fire stations"), but if you want a real data-service then you go with GeoServer/MapServer/etc.
> 
> Most importantly though, I think I haven't conveyed my core point well: this really is a zero sum game!
> Even allowing for the above, any funds spent on QGIS Server are not spent on QGIS Desktop. There are 60 public facing QGIS Server deployments. Even assuming that there's a ratio of 10:1 for private/public servers (made up ratio, feels too high), any funding on QGIS Server benefits only hundreds, or being very generous, maybe low-thousands number of users. Funding on QGIS Desktop however benefits as a *minimum* tens of thousands, potentially millions of users (no idea how many QGIS installs there are, I can't find the download-stats I remember seeing in the past).
> Heck, even pretending for a second QGIS Server had 100% of the deployments (a 100 fold increase!), there would /still/ be orders of magnitude more people using the not-Server parts of QGIS Desktop by its very nature.
> 
> There are 3,102 open issues on the QGIS issue tracker. 95 are labelled regressions, 137 are "high priority", and 92 are "crash/data corruption". Just 49 are "Server". I'm not seeking to denigrate the project here; QGIS is a extremely complex tool that is an amazing accomplishment and by its nature it will have bugs. I raise these numbers to highlight that any money spent on Grants to Server (and yes new Desktop features) is money that isn't spent fixing these (I'm aware of the bug-fixing fund). Something I think the grant voters should be cognizant of.
> 
> Hope that clarifies,
> I'll step back now. :-)
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
> 
> On 09/06/2020 08:09, Andreas Neumann wrote: Hi Jonathan, 
> You keep repeating yourself. You started the exact same discussion a 
> year ago. 
> You have a valid point, of course, I don't argue that. But if you think 
> about small organizations  that do not have a lot of personal (or 
> financial) resources, it would be a lot of burden to invest twice the 
> time in styling: once for QGIS desktop and another time again for UMN 
> mapserver and Geoserver. Even if SLD output from QGIS improved (also 
> thanks to efforts of Andrea Aime and others), it still can't transport 
> everything. If it would, then I would better agree with your argument. 
> For such smaller organization, speed (and I know that UMN and Geoserver 
> are a bit faster than QGIS server) is not the only important thing - it 
> is also their personal and financial resources and complexity of their 
> software landscape. 
> And QGIS server has some other unique selling points: the proprietary 
> GetPrint command that doesn't have a match in Geoserver or UMN, the 
> ability to create Atlases from server, and who knows, in the future 
> perhaps QGIS server can run processing models. 
> Greetings, 
> Andreas 
> On 2020-06-08 22:42, Jonathan Moules wrote: 
> 
> Hi List, 
> Some of you may have seen my blog post on the OSGeo-Discuss list about which mapping servers are the most deployed. For those who haven't seen it, QGIS Server has about 60 public deployments (1% of all of them), and it serves 11,924 datasets (0.5% of all public geospatial WMS/WFS/WCS/WMTS datasets). 
> 
> Potentially controversial here and I appreciate it's not a competition, but given the low uptake of QGIS Server compared to other Open Source offerings (GeoServer: 964 deployments, 963,603 datasets; MapServer: 544 deployments, 389,709 datasets), is QGIS Server something the grant program should be funding? There are three Server proposals totalling EUR10,000, 22% of the fund. 
> 
> Now, before you get the pitchforks out(!), please consider the following: 
> 
> * Zero sum game - Any money spent on QGIS Server cannot be spent on QGIS Desktop. (The grants mostly aren't things that will improve the shared QGIS Core). (This reasoning also follows through to OSGeo funds). 
> 
> * Multiple solutions - Open Source (and OSGeo) already has a very healthy ecosystem of mapping servers - does it need another one? 
> 
> * Limited number of users benefited - I don't have stats for it, but QGIS Desktop is probably the most popular Open Source Desktop GIS, and is certainly going to have many orders of magnitude more users than QGIS Server. 
> 
> * Playing to your strengths - QGIS' strength is it's Desktop and it's generally good practice to play to your strengths. 
> 
> So given the above, and that QGIS is already "winning" as an Open Source Desktop (great job!), I'd like to suggest it's not a good idea to dilute the limited resources by spending them on QGIS Server. Instead it seems that far more people would benefit if that money was spent on Desktop, especially the bug fixing programme. 
> 
> Or alternatively, given the "Unique Selling Point" of QGIS Server is its integration with QGIS Desktop, those resources could be used to further improve interoperability with GeoServer/MapServer/deegree/etc. Those are all successful mature OSGeo projects that excel at serving maps, have an architecture designed for it, and already have huge install bases. 
> 
> TLDR: QGIS excels at being a Desktop, and I'd like to suggest it should play to its strengths and focus its limited funds there to benefit the most users. 
> 
> I shall now retreat to my bunker. :-) 
> 
> Cheers, 
> Jonathan 
> 
> Note: The above only applies to the Grant program and funding; how developers wish to spend their time, and on which projects is of course their own prerogative. 
> 
> (Disclosure: I have no horse in this race; I don't run or administer any mapping servers, but I have done GeoServer in the past.) 
> 
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