[Qgis-psc] On finances

[Tim Sutton]

Hi


> On 03 Dec 2018, at 10:14, Andreas Neumann <andreas at qgis.org> wrote:
> 
> 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 <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.

I don’t think there is any choice other than to dive into the bottomless pit to invest in getting those bugs fixed. The only way out I can see is to a) get stricter about accepting code that lacks tests and b) invest an equal amount in unit test development that we can catch bugs before they enter the code base….


> 
> 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.
> 

+1 from me - although we still have issues, the improvements to the quality of QGIS over the last few years are really noticeable...

> 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.

+1 on this idea from me…..

Regards

Tim


> 
> I will also make a first proposal for the 2019 budget - so that we can start discussing it.
> 
> Greetings,
> Andreas
> 
> --
> Andreas Neumann
> QGIS.ORG <http://qgis.org/> board member (treasurer)
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—








Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

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Skype: timlinux 
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