[Qgis-psc] Draft blog article about enterprises

[HAUBOURG]

Hi all, 
Sorry for posting in PSC list, but I wanted to send a big +1 to Matthias initiative.
 I was quite shocked by recent marketing campaigns trying to endorse QGIS and downgrading QGIS to a simple community edition, just as other pseudo open Source projects based on one unique contributor that has a lot more to sell than only community edition. 

Probably we have some marketing person behind this not totally clear with how QGIS community lives and wins. I hope those guidelines will help keeping work in good terms and keep up sharing work. In that case, developper's work is really done the right way, only marketing campaign is overselling things, mind confusing for users / customers. 
 
Maybe we could shorten a bit the intro part, because readers not aware of what has actually happened could sidewalk before reaching guidelines. 

Thanks again 
Régis


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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Re: Draft blog article about enterprises collaborating with
>       QGIS (Matthias Kuhn)
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2016 09:09:34 +0200
> From: Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch>
> To: qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-psc] Draft blog article about enterprises
> 	collaborating with QGIS
> Message-ID: <57187CAE.8030502 at opengis.ch>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
> This looks really good to me!
> 
> Thanks you for taking the time to write this article Matthias
> 
> On 04/21/2016 07:23 AM, Tim Sutton wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> > Following a suggestion by Richard I have been drafting an article for
> > the QGIS blog about how companies can approach building services
> > around QGIS in a sensitive way. I am inlining my first draft (I
> > haven’t taken an editorial re-read of it yet). Do others agree with
> > the general sentiments laid out here and are you happy for me to post
> > it? Also if you have other good points to raise please let me know.
> >
> >
> > ———— copy starts —————————
> >
> > Over the years, QGIS has gained more functionality, more users and
> > more people and organisations who make their livelihood from it. As an
> > Open Source project, there are two things that we value most highly:
> >
> >  1. Our community of project contributors  2. Our community of users
> >
> > The two groups are intermingled, co-dependent and indispensable to the
> > project. As both these groups have grown, our reach has grown. Now as
> > a project we touch the lives of (by best estimation) hundreds of
> > thousands of users and contributors around the world.
> >
> > It is a natural consequence of such reach that QGIS has become an
> > attractive platform for companies on which to build service based
> > business models to their customers. From this rises the advent of
> > 'enterprise' offerings - service packages tailored for large corporate
> > and government institutions which need service level agreements,
> > guaranteed turn around times, helpdesk support and so on. As a
> > volunteer driven, grass roots project we are not in the position and
> > do not have the interest in catering to this class of user base - it
> > is far better taken care of through third party service providers that
> > have the infrastructure and legal means to set up such service offerings.
> >
> > As the momentum grows around such enterprise services it is probably
> > an inevitable consequence that tension may arise between third party
> > service providers and the QGIS core project.In simplistic terms this
> > tension can be seen as the dichotomy between those of us who view our
> > work on QGIS as a labour of love versus those who see it their work
> > around QGIS as a labour of commercial enterprise.
> >
> > The reality is that much like the relationship between project
> > contributors and our community of users, there is a huge amount of
> > potential symbiosis between the QGIS developer community and the
> > growing number of value added resellers providing services around
> > QGIS: many of the improvements, bug fixes and other enhancements
> > produced by value added resellers make their way back into the core
> > QGIS offering, whilst the body of work produced by the community of
> > QGIS project contributors becomes the basis around which value added
> > resellers build their marketplace offering.
> >
> > Over the years we have tried to be sensitive to the fact that many
> > people rely on QGIS for their livelihood - initiatives such as our
> > Long Term Release programme, the creation of test suites and heavy
> > investment of donated project funds into bug fixing (among many other
> > similar initiatives) have all gone a long way to making QGIS a viable
> > platform for value added resellers. We would like to ask that
> > resellers give the QGIS project similar consideration in their
> > marketing and work endeavours. As such I would like to present a few
> > simple guidelines below that you should use as guiding principles in
> > your interaction with the QGIS project. I will use a hypothetical
> > company 'ACME Corp.' in my examples below:
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --
> >
> > *Keep us in the loop*
> >
> > There is so much going on around the QGIS project we often get
> > surprised by things people do. More often than not it is a pleasant
> > surprise but sometimes it isn't. If you are planning some big new
> > feature or creating a new service around QGIS, I highly recommend that
> > you share it with the community early in your planning process. In
> > particular for the case of new features that you would like to see in
> > the main code base, coming along with an ACME Corp. 10,000 line code
> > contribution with no prior consultation creates ample room for friction.
> >
> > *Don't present your work as our work*
> >
> > It seems obvious, but many miss the nuance here. If you wrote a
> > marvellous plugins to count sheep in farm fields because it will add
> > great value to your customers, call it 'ACME. Corp sheep counter', not
> > 'QGIS Sheep Counter'
> >
> > *Don't present our work as your work*
> >
> > This is the corollary to the above. Our community works incredibly
> > hard to make QGIS, the web site, the documentation, triage bugs,
> > provide help on the mailing lists and forums. All that effort can be
> > disregarded in a single line of careless copy like '/QGIS by ACME
> > Corp. is the next best thing since sliced cheese/'. Show a little love
> > to the people that built the platform for your service offering and
> > refer back to the parent QGIS project and it's community as the
> > progenitor of all the goodness you are sharing with your clients. That
> > does not denigrate the valuable service that you provide your
> > customers and it lets them know that you represent your company and
> > work fairly and contribute back to the source project that you are
> > basing your services on.
> >
> > *Friends don't fork*
> >
> > Forking in Open Source is the process by which you create your own
> > divergent copy of the  software and maintain it independently, often
> > resulting in two incompatible versions (at the source code level) of
> > the same project. Nobody really wins from that. Your customers lose
> > the ability to migrate projects, workflows, knowledge between the
> > community maintained version of QGIS and your modified one. Your
> > developers get stuck in a one directional highway which takes them
> > further and further away from the original code base and any
> > opportunity to capitalise on the work of other contributors from the
> > QGIS community. In reality forking is normal (its the standard
> > workflow in GitHub for example), but I really am referring to the
> > process whereby you create an heavily diverged copy of the source code.
> >
> > *Don't rebrand*
> >
> > Every few months I get an email from a value added service provider
> > asking me if I can help them produce a version of QGIS which is
> > rebranded as 'ACME Corp. GIS'. By rebranding here I mean deep
> > rebranding - not just replacing the splash screen (which I am
> > generally OK with), but changing the word 'QGIS' everywhere in the
> > source code and user interface to 'ACME Corp. GIS'.  Beyond the fact
> > that you instantly break all sorts of things like QGIS project file
> > support, you also create a fork that will require massive amounts of
> > maintenance  to keep in sync with the upstream project.
> >
> > *Integrate your team with the QGIS community*
> >
> > One great way to give your clients a good service and to ensure your
> > work is well accepted is to integrate your developers with the QGIS
> > community. By that I mean let them subscribe to our mailing lists,
> > participate in architecture and other discussions, fix issues,
> > contribute code, attend our 6 monthly hackfests and generally be part
> > of the ebb and flow of the project. There are so many benefits to
> > doing this - both to QGIS and yourself - which is probably evidenced
> > by the fact that the most well known QGIS value added service
> > providers each have a number of developers participating in the
> > community. My main motivation above all other reasons is that they
> > will gain the sensitivity to know how to get your improvements
> > integrated into the code base, and the trust and camaraderie of the
> > other community members which is great when the time comes that they
> > need help solving problems.
> >
> > *Integrate your work with the QGIS code base*
> >
> > Whenever you are thinking about new features for your clients, I
> > encourage you to think about how to make them generic enough that they
> > can be incorporated into the main code base. Once you do that, you
> > have an automatic delivery platform of your work to your users. QGIS
> > has a well established release routine and the features shipped with
> > QGIS get tested and used by many thousands of users. Besides you are
> > benefitting from the features others are funding, why not pay the same
> > complement back?
> >
> > *Don't only contribute code*
> >
> > For some reason coders are treated as the main hero's in the story of
> > an Open Source project. Many people overlook the fact that there is a
> > far larger team of translators, document writers, sys admins, authors,
> > artists, testers and enthusiasts who contribute a massive amount of
> > effort into the project. When you are thinking about how to contribute
> > back to the project, take a moment to think about all the
> > infrastructure around the project and how you might help that along
> > along with the cool new features you plan to contribute to the code base.
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --
> >
> >
> > There are many other things that you can do to integrate yourself into
> > the community, but my real point in this article is that although QGIS
> > is Free Software, it is not made for free. Many people have put a lot
> > of sweat equity into QGIS and the only reward they get for their work
> > (if they are lucky) is recognition and appreciation. Think of them
> > when you build services on top of QGIS and find ways to acknowledge
> > and motivate them!
> >
> > Here's looking forward to seeing many thousands of people making their
> > livelihood by offering services around QGIS!
> >
> > Tim Sutton
> >
> > (QGIS Project Chair)
> >
> > —————— copy ends -------------
> >
> >
> >
> > ---
> >
> > *Tim Sutton*
> > QGIS Project Steering Committee Chair
> > tim at qgis.org <mailto:tim at qgis.org>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Qgis-psc mailing list
> > Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org
> >
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> --
> Matthias Kuhn
> OPENGIS.ch -
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> Spatial • (Q)GIS • PostGIS • Open Source
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