[Qgis-psc] On finances

[Andreas Neumann]

Dear PSC and other interested community members,

I updated our financial situation. Please see the summary at
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WphBgUOx0abTJ_33jRVqFTkRU7KYrg8GyBLFdkYC2hw/edit?usp=sharing

There are good news and bad news.

Good news: On the income side we are doing better than what I budgeted. I
still expect maybe up to 10k additional contributions.

Bad news: On the expenses side we are doing much worse than what I
budgeted. And there are still a couple thousand of additional invoices.
Most items are more or less within the budget, except for the bug fixing
expenses. These are a bit of a bottomless pit. One could go on forever with
bug fixing and never be finished. We already spent 87 k € on bug fixing,
more than twice than what I had in the budget - and there are still many
severe bugs (including data loss, crashes or regressions) that bother many
of our users. I also expect about 10k invoices around documentation and the
QGIS grant from Matteo/Harissou.

But I hope this is ok with you that we spend the bulk of our expenses on
bug fixing. As I already told you, the results of a recently run survey
among Swiss QGIS users, showed that quality is the main concern of our
users. While the functionality of QGIS is already great and often even
exceeds what our users need, they are still bothered with crashes, data
loss or disappointments in speed for large data sets. We are making
progress, but there are still many issues.

We should lead a discussion on how we could further improve the quality of
QGIS. I am very grateful that many of our core QGIS developers also take
part in the bug squashing activity prior to each release. Without that, I
think QGIS would be in a much worse shape. I think spending funds on this
makes a huge difference.

Personally I wonder if we shouldn't have a break in features for a period
of one release where all of use would focus on stabilizing QGIS and
improving the quality - both of QGIS itself and also in the documentation.
Have one release windows (4 months) where we do not accept any major new
features, but concentrate on fixing issues.

I will also make a first proposal for the 2019 budget - so that we can
start discussing it.

Greetings,
Andreas

--
Andreas Neumann
QGIS.ORG board member (treasurer)
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