[Qgis-psc] QGIS for Mac OS packaging and infrastructure

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi all,
not being an oSX user, I'm not directly interested in this subject, but
I think it is an interesting case in the transformation of our project.
Of course any company is free to package and sell QGIS (this as
everybody knows is one of the fundamental GPL freedoms). I am not sure
this would be of direct interest for the project though. If it is, we
could have ad hoc donation channels for each OS packaging, but I think
embarking in this will not be easy.
What would make me uneasy is to grant different treatment to our users
choosing different OSs (free OSs are a special case in this regards) or
to our packagers.
All the best.

On 26/03/19 17:08, Luigi Pirelli wrote:
> I'm not in general in favor of fees on a free (as freedom) project,
> but in win or linux env, we do not have to pay Apple to sign the
> application of buy a dedicated hardware to perform CI! (revolutionary tax)
> I'm in favor of a fee considering the fact that OSX (not mac) users
> didn't want to crowdfund the packaging of support OSX costs for CI
> (mostly US market). In Win env (now) there is a good dev community that
> can compile and help build documentation and debug. The only effort on
> OSX package is lutra's contribution (AFAIK) => there is no a fair balance!
> IMHO spend project funds to a packaging process that nor their user want
> to support is like continuing to give support to QGIS package for Win XP
> that is no supported nor by M$.
> 
> More, with Apple moving more to an entertainment company we should
> consider it carefully... IMHO project funds for a packaging that are
> strictly dependent to commercial decisions is too risky! (remember all
> harware lost changing apple powerPC to intel processors 10 years ago).
> 
> my2c
> 
> Luigi Pirelli
> 
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> 
> 
> On Tue, 26 Mar 2019 at 16:36, Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com
> <mailto:tim at kartoza.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi
> 
>>     On 26 Mar 2019, at 14:39, Alessandro Pasotti <apasotti at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:apasotti at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     Ok I know this may sound heretic (please don't send me to the
>>     stake or my kids will starve), but did you consider selling the
>>     Mac packages for a small fee?
>>
>>     I mean it's absolutely fair that you require a compensation for
>>     all you hard work on the Mac stuff, you well deserve it, but I'm
>>     not sure this should be on the general QGIS.org <http://QGIS.org>
>>     budget.
>>
>>     The rationale is that the we all know the reasons why developing
>>     on Mac is so expensive (well, Mac is so expensive in general) and
>>     I think that Mac users should pay for the most of it, not all the
>>     users.
> 
>     As a totally biased MacOS user I’m -1 for this. I don’t think
>     supporting packages on Windows or Linux is really any cheaper, just
>     that we had a willing volunteer (Jürgen and others for other Linux
>     derivatives) who contributed a lot of effort for free. I would
>     really not like to see that we single out one platform and start
>     charging for packages it.
> 
>     Regards
> 
>     Tim
> 
> 
>      
> 
> 
> 
> 
>     ---
> 
>     *Tim Sutton*
>     tim at qgis.org <mailto:tim at qgis.org>
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/