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

[Alessandro Pasotti]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 7:05 AM Saber Razmjooei <
saber.razmjooei at lutraconsulting.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Many thanks for your suggestions and feedback.
>
> To make a couple of things clear:
>
> 1- Packaging is not an exciting feature, so crowd-funding will not result
> in many responses.
> 2- Neither Peter nor Denis are short of fee-earning work. So, the aim of
> the QEP is to help with bringing macOS packaging in par with other OSes
> from developers and users point of view.
> 3- @Richard 🌍 Duivenvoorde <richard at duif.net>  I don't want to disclose
> the name of the organisation who funded the initial work. But the idea was
> that they would consider supporting QGIS directly, once they have better
> signed packages for their. There was a discussion in Zanzibar with Andreas
> about possible funding as well.
>
> Kind regards
> Saber
>
> On Wed, 27 Mar 2019 at 05:46, Richard 🌍 Duivenvoorde <richard at duif.net>
> wrote:
>
>> On 27/03/2019 00.45, Nyall Dawson wrote:
>> > The trick is balancing being a professional, finance driven project
>> > whilst still encouraging donations of code and new community members.
>> > If we discourage commercial investment and the sponsored work of
>> > Lutra, North Road, OpenGIS, Oslandia, 3liz, camptocamp, Sourcepole,
>> > iMhere Asia, etc then we won't have anywhere near the activity we see
>> > today. For many of us it's no longer a "partly to get a living"
>> > matter, it's a "my livelihood DEPENDS on being paid for the work I do"
>> > matter. We've taken the risk to drop stable work as employees for
>> > commercial firms and instead dedicate our time to making QGIS better.
>> >
>> > So let's be cautious in these discussions. Please don't disparage or
>> > put down commercially backed work. Embrace the changing nature of the
>> > project and the benefits it's given to all, and help to guide the
>> > project to ensure that both commercial backed work AND community can
>> > co-exist together.
>>
>> Ok, I'll try to be more cautious, I'm not putting down commercial work!
>>
>> I've no problem with commercial interest, I do have myself too partly. I
>> hoped that pointing to the Crowdfunding efforts that I'm ok if companies
>> keep up their own pants. But I do have problems if certain commercial
>> interests eat 20% of community interest. Then there is an imbalance.
>> If I look at both the dev and the user 'market', giving/asking 20% of a
>> yearly budget to a maybe 5 percent market share is not proportional.
>> Before starting to point to the other OS with a small user market share:
>> at least they offer (looking at the dev meetings or commumity
>> discussions on the list) a large part of dev's AND community discussions.
>>
>> We have to manage this balance carefully, I do not have a good plan for
>> it. But looking at other projects: Postgres? Debian? Apache? Kernel?
>> should help. But it is HARD: I've seen OSM point to us after Anita's talk.
>>
>> @saber: who paid for the effort till oct 2019? Apparently if was more
>> expensive then they thought? Can they be asked to sponsor the rest?
>>
>> As a personal note about passing this point 3 years ago: I'm aware of
>> that and it affects my 'fun' in the project. It's hard to give back to a
>> project for free if others try to get a living from the same.
>> So I hereby give up my PSC position to somebody who can handle this
>> tension better.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> R
>>
>
>
Well, now I'm sorry I started this discussion, I really hope you will
retire your resignation ...

To make it clear, my original proposal to start selling the packages was
aimed to Lutra/OpenGIS and not to QGIS.org.

Selling QGIS packages happened in the past for Windows and Mac (Boundless
did it and probably other companies too, there were plans for Linux also)
so I don't get the victimism about anti-Mac bias.

About working for fun, I also passed that point and some of the activities
that needs to be done in order to keep QGIS quality high is no much fun for
me anymore, it's mostly hard work.

Sometimes it's difficult to keep the balance but I think I've found my way
and I manage to keep the % of volunteer work significantly high, but this
is only possible if I get a decent income from other QGIS related and paid
work.

I believe it depends on a lot of different factors: I could probably
maintain part of the web infrastructure in my spare time, but QGIS C++ core
development and systematic bugfixing is probably one of the activities that
requires a lot of time, experience  and commitment that unless you are very
wealthy on you own I don't think you can afford to do that as a volunteer
only.

-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it
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