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Quantum GIS Funding Drive
posted by Satri
on Monday November 06, @09:00AM
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from the you-get-more-than-what-you-pay-for dept.
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from the you-get-more-than-what-you-pay-for dept.
Tim Sutton writes "Over at qgis.org, the developers of Quantum GIS (QGIS) have been labouring on version 0.8 for nearly a year now. Its been a long slog with a major architectural change — moving from the Qt3 toolkit to Qt4. This lays the foundation for a long lived version 1.0 release in the not too distant future. However close to releasing version 0.8 we get, there always seems to be 'one more bug' to squash though. With some great support from our users, we have now embarked on a funding drive to hire a developer.
This marks a turning point in the life of QGIS. We've always been a project made up of dedicated developers dabbling in building a Free and Open Source GIS in our (often limited) spare time. Now we aim to ramp things up a notch. We have had so much good will and thanks from our many users but never had a decent way to channel it. With our sponsorship programme our users now have the opportunity to make a concrete contribution to getting this and future versions of QGIS 'out there'. Initially we plan for the sponsored developer to work solely on bug fixes, with a particular emphasis on getting the Windows version to work more robustly. This is a nod of acknowledgement to the fact that we realise that many, many of our users are working on the Windows platform.
If anyone out there on the slashgeo community would like to get involved (for example by advertising our funding drive on your web site / pod cast / blog etc., or becoming an individual or corporate sponsor of QGIS) we look forward to hearing from you!
Tim Sutton
QGIS Project Steering Committee member"
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Technology: QGIS 0.8 Released
[+]
I've been waiting for the official announcement, but since main ports have been compiled, there you go: the multiplatform open source desktop GIS Quantum GIS 0.8 has been released! From the what's new: "* WMS support
* Improved vector and attribute editing
* Improved measure tools with area measuring
* Attribute searching
* New legend structure
* Refactoring of API to allow the use of QGIS libraries in mapping applications
* Improved MapServer export tool
* Vector layer transparency and antialiasing
* GRASS support in all platforms
* Enhanced GRASS support and toolbox commands
* Enhanced vector editing, including copy, cut, paste, snapping and vertex editing
* Shapefile/OGR layer editing"
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tread carefully
(Score:2, Informative)Nothing kills the volunteer spirit like a disproportionate advantage.
Re:tread carefully
(Score:3, Informative)( http://qgis.org/ )
Yes we know / knew about this before embarking on our sponsorship campaign. However we believe our approach is fundamentally different and don't expect to run into the same problems. In particular:
- prospective hirees (in the case there are more than one) will be voted into place. All developers are entitled to vote.
- the work that will be carried out by the developer will be decided on in the open - no cloak and dagger operations.
- there is no seperate entity whose motives are potentially questionable governing what work gets done and by whom
Of course this is our first foray into a funded development model and so we can and probably will make mistakes. Yet we believe if we are open and honest about the process and the problems we encounter we can avoid DuncTank type issues.
Related: OSGeo Project Sponsorship
(Score:2)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @04:07PM )
Re:Related: OSGeo Project Sponsorship
(Score:3, Informative)( http://qgis.org/ )