[Qgis-psc] Sourcepole offer to port QGIS vector analysis tool to QGIS master

[Vincent Picavet (ml)]

Hello,

A reaction to the initial proposal and Martin's comment.

On the proposal, I am worried about the global process, which does not
seem a fair way of doing things. I understand this is mainly a context
and situational issue.
IMHO this should never be the way we should do things. I fear that going
further with this proposition would carry a bad image on the development
and funding processes of QGIS. We are not really in a momentum where we
can do exceptions to rules we are still trying to define.

We (and most opensource project) have development processes going this
way "announce what you want do, do it, enforce quality on it, review,
and integrate it".

We should not encourage a different process by funding it, even if it
may be the easiest technical way.

On 24/11/2015 17:14, Martin Dobias wrote:
> In order to keep spending of QGIS.ORG efficient and transparent, it
> would make sense to undertake bigger projects through a simple bidding
> process. The board would prepare a specification with requirements and
> any interested party would be allowed to participate. Bidders would
> submit their proposals and the board would then award the contract to
> the best bid. A proposal would include 1. total cost, 2. delivery
> date, 3. draft QEP, so that it is clear what the developers want to
> do.

I am totally against QGIS.org managing tender bids.

It would come with a lot of conflicts of interest. This is something
which is very difficult to do well, and for an organization to gain
trust on such a process, it would need a lot of efforts.
Furthermore, QGIS.org operates on an international level, and
differences of business cultures, contract management and terms and
administrative tasks would add to the difficulty.

There is a strong difference between QGIS.ORG funding things that nobody
wants to do, and managing tender bids between competitors for feature
development.
While I truly support the former, the latter should be out of scope for
the organization, and this should be clearly stated somewhere.

Vincent



> 
> Regards
> Martin
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Neumann, Andreas <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
>> Hi QGIS.ORG board,
>>
>> As you may know, Sourcepole developed the Vector analysis tools from Scratch
>> for QGIS enterprise. They are apparently willing to port it into QGIS master
>> - but there are several things missing. They would do the missing parts for
>> 25k CHF (Swiss franks) - it probably also contains a smaller share of the
>> initial dev costs they had.
>>
>> The missing bits are:
>>
>> - porting into QGIS master
>>
>> - moving the code from plugin to QGIS core analysis library
>>
>> - create Python bindings
>>
>> - create unit tests
>>
>> -----------------------
>>
>> What they already did:
>>
>> Complete Rewrite in C++ of:
>>
>> - Convex Hull
>>
>> - Buffer
>>
>> - Intersect
>>
>> - Union
>>
>> - Symmetric difference
>>
>> - Clip
>>
>> - Difference
>>
>> - Dissolve
>>
>> - Eliminate sliver poylgons
>>
>> It allows to save the result as any OGR format, supports multi-threading and
>> comes with a detailed error log in case of problems with invalid geometries.
>>
>> ---------------------------
>>
>> Some additional background: they already invested >200 hours for the
>> re-development of the above methods. This equals about 35 kCHF.
>>
>> ----------------------------
>>
>> Timing: they could probably do it for the QGIS 2.16 release (feature freeze
>> May 20, 2016). They are busy with contracts - they cannot do it earlier with
>> the resources they have.
>>
>> To me, personally, this sounds like a good offer.
>>
>> We would have to find a solution for our short-term problems with fTools -
>> but to me this is a very good proposal to have a good fTools replacement in
>> the future.
>>
>> Andreas
>>
>>
>>
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