[Qgis-psc] Contributing an SQL Anywhere plugin/provider

[Dave.DeHaan at sybase.com]

Hello Project Steering Committee,

I work for Sybase, performing R&D for our SQL Anywhere (SA) product.  SA is
a cross-platform feature-rich relational DBMS, whose market niches are
small- to medium-sized businesses, embedded applications, and mobile
environments.  Our most recent version (SA12) added comprehensive spatial
support, modelled after the SQL/MM and OGC standards.  We ship a spatial
viewer with our product as part of the administrative tools, but it is
exactly that---a viewer intended for developers or administrators, not an
end-user GIS application.  Many of our customers are new to spatial data
and are starting to consider how it might benefit their business.  For
those customers interested in trying out a feature-rich GIS application, we
would like to be able to recommend the Quantum GIS project.  From our
perspective, enabling QGIS to work with SQL Anywhere could be a benefit
both to Sybase customers and to the QGIS project.

To that end, I have written a C++ plugin/data-provider combination that
interfaces QGIS (works with v1.5 and 1.6) with an SA12 (or later) backend.
All that is needed to compile them is a few SA-specific header files, which
we have released under the Apache v2.0 licence.  To establish a connection
to an SA server requires that the client machine has the (proprietary) SQL
Anywhere client libraries installed; otherwise a message to that effect is
displayed, along with a link to download the free Developer's edition of
SA.

The plugin/provider code will be released under GPLv3.  Although we could
distribute it ourselves, we would prefer to contribute it back to the QGIS
project so that the SA compatibility is packaged and distributed as part of
the main QGIS application.  For convenience, we would also contribute the
SA-specific headers to the repository (three files subject to the Apache
license, not GPL).  I would be willing to join the project as maintainer of
this code.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on accepting this contribution.

Best regards,
David DeHaan

PS - In the interest of full discloser, over the weekend I had a brief
email discussion with Tim, Marco, and Gary about licensing details.  They
suggested this posting to the PSC once our lawyers signed off on the GPL
release, which has now happened.

----
David E. DeHaan, Ph.D.
SQL Anywhere Research and Development
Query Processing team
Sybase iAnywhere
www.sybase.com/ianywhere