[Qgis-psc] Proposal that QGIS.ORG will become a member of the OpenDesign Alliance

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hello,

On 15/12/2015 15:37, Andreas Neumann wrote:
> Hi QGIS.ORG board,
>
> As you may be aware, Jürgen I worked on a proposal to allow import of
> CAD data into QGIS. Jürgen provided an offer.
>
> We plan to use the Teigha library of the OpenDesign Alliance (ODA)
> (https://www.opendesign.com/the_oda_platform/Teigha). It isn't GPL
> compatible and it requires a membership fee with annual renewal.
>
> I was investigating whether OSGEO could become a member - this is
> theoretically possible, but it would require a higher and more expensive
> membership level than as if QGIS.ORG would become a member. I would thus
> propose that QGIS.ORG becomes a sustaining member of the ODA, which
> would allow to distribute binaries of the Teigha library for all of our
> supported platforms, along with the QGIS binaries.
>
> Financially, the sustaining membership level would mean US $5000.- in
> the first year and US $3000.- annual renewal in the subsequent years. I
> would propose that QGIS.ORG would pay this membership fees from the
> QGIS.ORG funds - and if you agree - will include it into our 2016
> budget. See https://www.opendesign.com/Sustaining

I am really wondering where we are going to right now with QGIS.Org.

I already gave my opinion that the organization should not spend money
to fund features. This is just an opinion, and I do respect that some
would not agree. It would at least need a debate first though.

But this yet is another story. Funding directly some proprietary
software vendors ? Yearly ? Really ?

I have no problem with QGIS plugins using some prorietary piece of code,
circumventing the GPL. But this proposal is a different beast :
* It is feature-related funding, for a quite large amount ( that's ok if
it is not qgis.org paying, but this should be clear)
* It would fund a proprietary software vendor ( definitly not ok)
* It would package proprietary software with default QGIS releases ( not
ok )
* It would implement a technical (ugly) workaround for licence
compatibility ( not ok in core or default installed plugin )
* It is a recurrent spending, with a very difficult way back ( removing
the user such a feature will be hard)

Why don't you implement a separate proprietary tool with a end-user
installer, having nothing to do with QGIS.org, OSGeo, nor QGIS
distribution, that allows format conversion to QGIS project/data/style
files ?
We would not have to mess with proprietary software, and any
non-opensource organization could pay the money to be allowed to
distribute it. Even a simple end user could distribute this separate
tool, paying the licence fee.
But please, do not involve QGIS.org in this mess, we have plenty enough
with the ECW opensource-not-libre dragon.

Or follow strk's advice and improve the libredwg library. That's the
right way to do things.

Regards,

Vincent

PS : Jeff will probably not answer your queries as he resigned from
OSGeo's board

> I will propose to make this decision dependent on our ability to raise
> the 32k Euros required to pay Jürgen for the QGIS-side development. So
> far I only have confirmations for about 10k Euros. Still some work to
> raise the full amount.
>
> Do you have any questions regarding this proposal?
> Thanks,
> Andreas
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