Where is QGIS being developed?

That is a questions my students often ask. Open Source is a strange and new ‘world’ for most of them. So I try to explain: QGIS is a software, developed and maintained from all over the world by developers who are employed by companies, self-employed or working for free…

Some of the work is paid for by QGIS and some by users and as written – some do it for free – yay!  The core developers meet two times a year for ‘Hackfests’  (do not confuse with ‘Hacking’).

Sometimes a Hackfest is combined with a user conference – where developers and users can meet, listen to presentations and discuss functionality.

In 2017, the first Hackfest will take place at the Linuxhotel in Essen – Germany from Friday from 28th April – 1st May. This Hackfest is only going to be hard work for the developers – QGIS 3.0 is being developed and launched this year. More details and signing in for this weekend on the event wiki page.

The second Hackfest in 2017 will include a Summer Camp and take place in Nødebo at University of Copenhagen, Forest and Landscape College (Denmark) from Wednesday  2. August till  Friday 11. august

The Summer Camp will be a combination of work and leisure for the developers. And for users there will be workshops.

It is the first time we are having a Summer Camp at the Forest and Landscape College. We have both the place for work and the nature for exploring.

There are 28 rooms/56 beds, 3 large shelters and a large lawn where you can bring a tent sleeping bag and mattress.

Nearby the wonderful forest and lake.

The setup is as following:

Users pay for participating in workshops, food and accommodation (room/bed) – Shelter and tent are free.

Developers and workshop lecturers stays for free.

Call for workshops and sponsors: If you have a topic for a workshop or want to contribute as sponsor, please send me an e-mail at [email protected]

Save the dates – and we will send out more information about the Summer Camp later this month.

Posted on behalf of Lene Fischer, QGIS Community Organizer

It is our pleasure to announce that the QGIS.org voting members have unanimously agreed to the adoption of the proposed new logo.

We are currently planning the roll out of the new logo to all our applications, web platforms, and social media accounts. In addition, we will create marketing material with the new QGIS branding.  Since this is a volunteer effort, we are planning to approach this step-by-step. The goal is to have everything ready by the time of the QGIS 3.0 release.

If you are interested in helping with this effort, please leave a comment here and we will get in touch!

2016 was an exciting year for us. It was a year with three great releases (2.14 LTR, 2.16 & 2.18), lots of developer and community events (including our 2nd user conference in Girona, the developer meeting in Bonn before FOSS4G & a QGIS Server sprint in Lyon) and many firsts, including the first round of QGIS grants and our new QGIS.org organizational structure.

Many of these initiatives would not be possible without support by our community, dedicated developers and our sponsors, who enable us to keep up our infrastructure and improve software and documentation. We’re particularly proud to welcome three user groups among our top sponsors, with the Swiss user group as our most prominent Gold sponsor:

Thank you for helping us improve the QGIS experience for everyone!

If you are following this blog, you are already aware that we have even bigger plans for 2017, including but not limited to the big QGIS 3.0 release and a completely overhauled QGIS logo.

We’re looking forward to another great year with the QGIS community.

Keep on QGISing!

If you have been following this blog and the QGIS community discussions, you will know that 2017 is going to be a big year in the history of QGIS since we are planning the release of QGIS 3.0. One of the requests we had during our Girona Hackfest held earlier this year was to come up with a fresher logo for QGIS. Some of you may remember that we had an abortive attempt at coming up with a new logo a couple of years ago. We found that process quite difficult to manage since we tried to do it in a completely open way and there were so many differing opinions, varying tastes and so on that the whole process reached an impasse and we decided to shelve the idea for time being. With that history in mind we decided to approach the logo updating process for QGIS 3.0 differently this time around  and use a professional designer to come up with a design and then provide the QGIS Voting Members with a simple, binary YES/NO choice as to whether they accept the new logo or not.

Our current logo is a revised, polished version of the original QGIS logo:

While we’ve all grown to love the yellow ‘Q’ with the green arrow (no comic pun intended), the design choices, such as glow effect and drop shadows look dated. Probably the biggest problem with the current logo is that there is also no consistent logo variant that spells out ‘QGIS’ without duplicating the Q. For the logo refresh we came up with a list of requirements for the new design:

• It should look more modern than the current logo
• Avoid any clichés with compass, north arrow and avoid image elements
• The logo has to work as a :
  • Large and small application icon (on computer desktop, menus, …)
  • On big posters & banners
  • On stickers to place on laptops etc
  • On t-shirts and other promotional materials
  • On letterheads etc.
• Should work well in monochrome (or have a monochrome variant)
• Square and rectangular variants should be possible
• If possible, keep element(s) from the current design. It is important for the new logo to try to retain some of these elements (Q, arrow, colors, …) so people can still recognize the QGIS brand.
• There should be a variant that includes the whole word ‘QGIS’ or ‘QGIS.ORG’. Currently when we place the logo next to the word QGIS we get a redundant QQGIS or we need to carefully match fonts to make it work
• As an application icon, it must work on light or dark backgrounds without modification
• As a general logo, it should have accepted variants that work on light or dark backgrounds
• Font has to be open source
• We should also consider how the logo and accent colours can be used in different contexts, e.g. stationery, stickers, …

We went through many iterations, reducing the number of options on each iterations as we applied the above criteria to the candidates. We would like to now present our final candidate (monochrome icon, colour icon, full logo):

While retaining the traditional yellow and green, the addition of a new third colour is a nice play on version 3.0. In addition, the old arrow is now a more natural part of the Q and there is a version designed to spell out QGIS.

Soon we will be asking the QGIS Voting Members to vote in order to affirm or reject this new logo. If it is approved we will start the process of rebranding QGIS for version 3.0. If not we will go back to the drawing board and repeat the process until we come up with a logo the QGIS Voting Members are happy with …

In 2017 we are planning to release QGIS 3.0. This new major version will become the basis of the next LTR release (QGIS 3.2) and is set to be a sea-change in the development of QGIS. It will modernize the architecture to get rid of many legacy issues that we were unable to resolve in the minor release series of 2.x releases. For example we are switching to Qt5, Python3 stripping out deprecated API’s, cleaning away many old code artifacts, and making a huge range of under the hood tweaks to improve the performance and stability of QGIS. Here are some of the other key issues that need to be worked on before we can release QGIS 3.0:

• Refactor attribute actions

• Remove old snapping classes

• Consolidate and tidy up singletons

• Cleanup (and rename?) QgsGeometry classes

• Support loading multiple project files at once

• http://Avoid dependency to gui when not needed

• QGIS Server needs to be updated to work with QGIS 3.0

• QGIS Composer needs an overhaul

There are many more ‘under the hood’ items like this that we would like sort out before we can release QGIS 3.0.

Recently we announced the winners for our new grant programme which directly funds developers wishing to make improvements to the QGIS project. We would like to amp things up a notch further and thus with this blog post we would like to make this appeal:

• If you are an individual user please consider making a donation to the project (donations can be made by PayPal or by direct bank transfer).
• If you work for a company, please consider becoming a project sponsor. Our entry level sponsorship is not a lot of money and will make a great contribution to the project. We are still looking for our first platinum sponsor – perhaps your company could be the first! Here is the list of sponsorship levels for quick reference:

• If you are a company that makes use of contract QGIS developers, include in your contracts a provision for the developer to get your new features into the 3.0 code base with a nice set of tests so that the burden does not get passed upstream to volunteer developers to port your features to QGIS 3.0.
• If you are a company that has in-house QGIS developers, consider allocating some of their time to supporting the QGIS 3.0 development effort.
• If you are a country user group, please try to hold a funding drive within your user group and pass the funds either to the upstream QGIS.ORG project or support developers who are in your country to do bug fixing and implementation work for QGIS 3.0.

If you have other ideas about how to support the effort we will be glad to hear them! We will put as much money from QGIS.ORG funds as possible into developers that are willing and able to work on the preparation of QGIS 3.0.

A huge thank you to all of those that have already contributed time and money into the effort to get QGIS 3.0 ready for release!

We are pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.18 ‘Las Palmas’. The city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria was the location of our autumn 2015 developer meeting.

This is the last release in the 2.x series. The current Long Term Release (LTR) remains version 2.14.x. This release provides incremental improvements over our previous release. The majority of activity is currently focused towards the development of QGIS 3.0 which is our next generation release planned for the end of the first quarter of 2017.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below – our very great thank you to all of our sponsors!

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.

We are extremely pleased to announce the winning proposals for our 2016 QGIS.ORG grant programme. Funding for the programme was sourced by you, our project donors and sponsors! Note: For more context surrounding our grant programme, please see:

• Update on the QGIS Grant Programme
• QGIS Grants: Call for applications

Our intent with the QGIS.ORG Grant Programme is to support work from community that would typically not be funded by client/contractor agreements, and that contributes to the broadest possible swathe of our community by providing cross-cutting, foundational improvements to the QGIS Project.

Voting to select the successful projects was carried out by our QGIS Voting Membership. Each voting member was allowed to select up to 6 of the 18 submitted proposals by means of a ranked selection form. The full list of votes are available here (on the first sheet). The second sheet contains the calculations used to determine the winner (for full transparency). The table below summarizes the voting tallies for those proposals that received one or more votes, along with brief notes on the methodology used:

A couple of extra notes about the voting process:

• Voting was carried out based on the technical merits of the proposals and the competency of the applicants to execute on these proposals.
• No restrictions were in place in terms of how many proposals could be submitted per person / organization, or how many proposals could be awarded to each proposing person / organization.
• Although the budget for the grant programme was €20,000.00, the total amount for the three winning proposals is €20,500.00 – an additional €500.00 was made available by the PSC towards the grant programme to accommodate this.
• Voting was ‘blind’ (voters could not see the existing votes that had been placed).

As mentioned in our previous blog post about this selection process, this is the first time that we have asked our newly formed group of QGIS Voting Members to vote. It is extremely gratifying to see such enthusiastic participation in the voting process. Of the 27 voting members, 24 registered their votes. There was one late submission that unfortunately had to be excluded, and 2 non-votes.

On behalf of the QGIS.ORG project, I would really like to thank everyone who submitted proposals for this call. There were many interesting proposals that I believe would be of great benefit to QGIS and I hope others perusing the proposals list will use their initiative and funding interesting proposals independently if they can.

Below you can find the detailed proposals of the successful applications – we look forward to seeing the results of their work land in the code base soon!

Details of the approved grant proposals

Implement a flexible properties framework in QGIS (Nyall Dawson) – €10,000

Details: I am applying for a QGIS grant to cover the implementation of a flexible “properties framework” for QGIS. I honestly believe that implementation of this framework will unlock cartographic power in QGIS well beyond anything that is currently possible in any of the desktop or web based mapping applications.

I propose to implement a system of managing and evaluating properties for generic objects within QGIS. Properties include all settings relating to symbology, such as a line marker’s width, color, or offset, label settings (eg font size, color, shadow opacity, etc), diagram properties (colors, size, etc) and composer item settings (position, rotation, frame size and color, etc). While currently many of the properties can be set to use “data defined overrides”, the properties framework will extend these capabilities by making them both more flexible and easier to use.

This proposal is being driven by a number of factors:

1. To avoid the current multiple duplicate code paths involving storage, retrieval and evaluation of data defined properties and to make it easier to add data defined support to more things (eg diagrams) without incurring even more duplicate code. Currently labeling, symbology and composer all have their own methods for handling data defined properties, which makes maintenance of data defined code very difficult.

2. To allow creation of other property types besides the current “data defined” (ie bound to field value or expression result) property, eg time based properties for a future in-built animation framework.

3. To avoid the complexity of requiring users to write their own expressions to map values to colors, sizes, etc and apply scaling functions to these, and instead expose these to users in an interactive, flexible way. Think Mapbox studio’s approach to zoom level styling (https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1829991/17850412/6a0f285e-68a0-11e6-8719-cdf74afd061d.jpg), but available for all property types. Eg data defined values can be set to preset ease in/ease out curves, or manually edited curves through an interactive GUI.

4. Enable the possibility of having live project wide colors. Ie a color palette could be created in the project properties, and color based properties “bound” to these colors. Altering the color would then automatically update every property which was bound to this preset color. This also brings the possibility of “color themes” for maps, eg binding properties to a predefined color types such as “highlights”, “background features”, etc, and then interactively changing all these color bound properties by applying a color theme to the project.

5. To allow a system of inherited and overridden properties. Eg QGIS default label font overridden by a project default font and finally overridden by label font setting. The proposed composer rewrite (layouts work) would use this property inheritance to bind layout item properties to a dynamic template. Changes in the template would be reflected in all linked layouts, but individual items could overwrite the inherited properties as required. Layout item properties could then be set globally (eg, font size), per project (eg font family), via a “master template” and finally individually per layout item.

6. The labelling engine has a need for predefined label styles. Label properties could be set globally, per project, via a predefined style, or overridden for a particular layer.

Technical details regarding this proposal are available in QEP 22 (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/38).

I am seeking funding to:

1. Implement the core functionality for the properties framework
2. Port symbology, labeling and diagrams to the framework, and enable data definable control of all appropriate diagram settings (currently diagrams have a very limited data defined control available)
3. Implement the GUI for the property framework, including:
– a widget for controlling property behaviour
– interactive widgets for size and color properties (which have been designed to work inside 2.16’s live layer styling dock)
– interactive widgets for setting the “easing” for properties, with choices of preset ease in/out methods + an interactive curve editor for manual control

If funds are remaining following these items, I will undertake (in order of priority):

4. Bound project colors
5. Begin work on labeling styles

History: Because I believe so firmly that this framework is required within QGIS, I have been building toward this work through numerous hours of development over the previous 2 years of QGIS releases. There were a number of prerequisite changes required first, such as the implementation of expression contexts. An initial PR (https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/2857) for the properties framework was filed in May 2016, which includes some of the core parts of this proposal. Changes were required based on feedback from that PR , however to date all work on this has been on a volunteer, unsponsored basis and unfortunately I am no longer able to complete such large scale changes as are required by this proposal without funding. Aside from the changes required from the initial PR, significant work remains in implementing GUI, unit tests, and porting symbology and labeling to the new framework.

Qualifications: I have an extensive history of large-scale contributions to QGIS since 2013 and a proven track record for writing polished UI with extensive unit testing. I’m passionate about QGIS, being a daily GIS user and strongly believe that this framework is required to take QGIS to the next level of cartographic abilities.

Implementation Plan: Due to the extensive refactoring and API changes which are required for implementing the properties framework, this work MUST be done in the QGIS 3.0 timeline. If it is not completed during the 3.0 API break period, the amount of work and cost required would substantially increase, and numerous methods across the symbology, labeling and diagrams API would be deprecated. Accordingly this work will be conducted during the QGIS 3.0 timeline, and for greatest testing I would aim to complete the work ASAP (likely complete by late October). Due to the changes required this work would NOT be suitable to backporting to the >= 2.18 branch and will be targeted at QGIS 3.0 only.

Proposal Link:  A QEP detailing technical implemention is available at: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/38, and an initial PR available at https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/2857

Introduce everything necessary for QGIS3 to OSGeo4W (Jürgen Fischer)- €6,000

Details: For QGIS3 we need packages of Qt5, PyQt5 and Python 3 (including many extensions currently available for Python 2).   The goal of this proposal is to introduce all required dependencies to OSGeo4W (32&64bit) that are necessary to build and package QGIS3. The requested amount will cover 60h of work on this.

History: I also did the packaging of Qt4, PyQt4 and QGIS.  I’ve also already started to build and package Qt 5.7 using Visual C++ 2015.

Qualifications: See previous point (or well known history)

Implementation Plan: I plan on doing it this in Q4 this year to have it available for the release and I don’t expect significant extra effort to support Windows (ie. if the issues are solved on a platform that already has Qt5 and friends available it should also work on Windows).

Implement an inbuilt Task Manager in QGIS for background long running tasks (Nyall Dawson) – €4,500

Details: QGIS requires a centralised, in built task manager to handle background threading of long running analysis tasks. Currently these long running tasks are either conducted while blocking the UI (such as when a snapping index is built for a layer) leading users to conclude that QGIS has frozen, via blocking progress dialogs which prevent interaction with QGIS while the operation proceeds, or via custom threaded implementations. By building a standard framework for handling these long running tasks, we will benefit by:

1. Avoiding UI blocking tasks, allowing users to continue working while the task is completed.
2. Simplify background task threading for plugin, processing algorithm (and core) developers by exposing a simple API for creating and scheduling long running tasks.
3. Benefit from the stabler code which comes as a result of having a single, well tested implementation of background threading rather than multiple custom implementations of this code.
4. We “catch up” to our commercial competitors (ie ArcGIS and MapInfo Professional), who currently have inbuilt background threading of long running tasks already available in their software.

This work was begun in https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3004, however significant changes are still required before the task manager can be merged into QGIS. It is vital that the task manager implementation is rock solid and with a future proof API which addresses our needs for the 3.x release cycle.

Accordingly, this grant proposal covers:

1. Building off the work started in the pull request, first addressing the feedback received from GitHub and from direct conversations with interested stakeholders and stabilising the API.
2. Completion of the unit tests to cover all parts of the framework.
3. Polish the GUI for interacting with running and completed tasks.
4. Writing documentation for the Python cookbook demonstrating how the task manager should be used from Python code.

(Please note that this proposal does not cover porting any existing code (such as processing) across to the new framework.)

History: An initial prototype of the work was begun in https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3004  

Qualifications: I have an extensive history of complex changes to QGIS code, and am currently one of the most active QGIS core developers. I have a track record of implementing stable, heavily unit tested code and supporting code I write for extended periods. I am also a daily user of QGIS as a GIS software application, so am invested in making the software as powerful, stable and easy to use as possible!

Implementation Plan: This work would be completed ASAP to allow for lengthy testing prior to the QGIS 3.0 release, and to allow the maximum time possible for developers to adapt their code and plugins to the new task manager interface.

Proposal Link: An initial prototype of the work was begun in https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/3004, and a video demonstration is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pXBZtWYFJc   

At the beginning of August this year, we put out a call for applications in our newly launched grant programme. The intent of the programme is to leverage donor and sponsor funding in order to support community members with great ideas to improve the underlying infrastructure of the QGIS project and code base.

We have had a really great response to the call for applications (detailed list of applications is here for your reading pleasure – 233KB download). There has also been some good discussion on the QGIS Developer mailing list about the evaluation process.

Given that we have 18 proposals and only 20,000 Euros to disburse, the QGIS voting members will need to make some tough, pragmatic choices. Its also noteworthy that this is the first time since establishing our community of QGIS Voting Members that we have asked them to vote on an issue. Our intent with the voting member system is to have a streamlined process for deciding on important issues whilst ensuring good representation of all members of the community. In case you are wondering who the QGIS Voting members are, I have prepared this little infographic below which lists the members and shows how they are elected  etc.

The voting for the grant proposals ends at the end of the September 2016, and we plan to announce the successful candidates soon after that – probably on the 4th of October. The PSC will arbitrate in the case of a dead heat or the proposal amounts of the top voted proposals not adding up to our funding target.

This round of grant proposals is special not only because it is the first time we are doing this, but also because the grant programme precedes the upcoming release of QGIS 3.0. Providing grants to facilitate this work will help to assure that QGIS 3.0 gets all the love and attention it needs in order to make it a success. That said, there is a huge amount of work to do, and it is mostly being done by a handful of very dedicated and generous (with their time) individuals. If you have the wherewithal to further support some of the grant proposals that did not make the cut, or the QGIS 3.0 effort in general, please get into contact with our treasurer, Andreas Neumann (finance [at] qgis.org) or head over to our sponsorship or donations page to support their work!

Lastly, I appeal to those QGIS Voting Members who have not yet cast their votes to check your email and head over to the voting form to cast your vote!

The core team of QGIS strives hard to provide the most advanced and user friendly GIS for free use by everyone. In the core QGIS project, every line of code that gets committed is subject to peer review when contributed by a non core developer. This gives us an opportunity to identify and correct inadvertent (or intentional) security issues that a developer may introduce into the code base. By contrast, all of the plugins that are published via the QGIS plugin repository are reviewed by the plugin developers themselves and we don’t have good insight into how much due diligence is applied to plugin code management.

The vast majority of our plugins (listed in http://plugins.qgis.org/ and inside your copy of QGIS) are developed by third parties, either individuals, companies, and institutions. As such, they are outside our direct control and the developers often relatively unknown to the QGIS community. We view this as a potential security risk. We are convinced the risk is small, because of many factors including the “many eyes” principle (the code is visible to everybody, and in use by thousands of people), but cannot exclude the possibility that someone tries to inject malicious code into a plugin.

In order to address this situation, we looked into the opportunity of implementing automatic tools to scan plugins, before their publication, and spot potential problems. Our research indicated that this approach would be difficult and costly, and easy to circumvent.

We (the PSC) therefore decided to implement a simple yet robust approach to security, based on the ‘web of trust’ principle: we trust people we know well in the community. You will see on the http://plugins.qgis.org web site that there is a ‘Trusted Author’ tag has been applied to plugins created by those members of the community that we know and trust.

The criteria for ‘Trusted Authors’ includes those community members that regularly meet at our QGIS developer meetings, and and those that are in almost daily contact with the core team via our developer mailing lists or background project discussions. The remaining plugins (and there are wonderful, reliable, robust, and useful plugins in the list) have not been given the ‘trusted’ label.

We would be delighted if a side effect of this choice would be to stimulate more active and direct involvement of plugin developers in the QGIS community. All plugin developers are therefore invited to join us at one of the next developer meetings (AKA HackFest), or otherwise become a recognized, active member of the community, so they can be integrated as ‘trusted’ plugin developers.

In autumn last year, we ran a rather large-scale user survey, which was translated into many languages and advertised here on this blog. The final reports can be found here:

• English (1476 responses)
• Spanish (122 responses)
• French (457 responses)
• Portuguese (146 responses)
• Romanian (30 responses)

(Let me know if you have links to other language versions which were not sent to the mailing list.)

Looking at the English report, most responses were filed by regular (49.7%) and advanced users (35.9%) who use QGIS at least several times per week. One interesting result is that responders feel that the project should still prioritise new features when spending funds:

Top 3 “highest priority for spending QGIS funds”

1. Important features that are missing (50%)
2. More bugfixing (24.1%)
3. Improved user documentation (12.4%)

This is also confirmed by the free comments section were roughly 23% of responders were asking for new features, 19% called for more stability (fewer releases and new features), and 9% for better documentation.

Documentation improvements were followed closely by calls for a more structured approach to plugins (making it easier to find the right tool for the job), stricter plugin documentation requirements, consolidation of plugins with similar functionality, and integration of key plugins into core.

When interpreting these results, it’s important to keep in mind that responses are skewed towards experienced users, who are more likely to require specialist functionality. Beginners on the other hand might rank stability, ease of use of core functionality, and good documentation higher.

We are pleased to announce the first round of funding for the QGIS grant programme.

What is the grant programme?

The QGIS.ORG grant programme is our way to accelerate and streamline development of the QGIS.ORG project by rewarding committed developers and contributors for their work through a grant system. It is a way to distribute our funds amongst our team members in a fair and transparent way.

Why have a grant programme?

There are four main reasons for embarking on a grant programme.

1. The first intent of the grant programme is to amplify the contributions of grantees by allowing them to spend more time on QGIS over and above what they would be able to do on a purely volunteer basis. At the broader level we would also like to avert the potentially negative reaction to funded development work in QGIS: “Why should I donate my time to work on QGIS when others are paid to do it?” And rather create an aspirational environment: “If I make a large contribution to QGIS I could also be eligible for a grant like other dedicated contributors have received.”
2. To simplify the decision making process for how to spend the funds received in the QGIS project via our Sponsorship and Donations programmes. The grant programme would allow us to streamline our decision making when it comes to funding developers. We receive many proposals for funding various activities in QGIS which invariably lead to protracted debate. In addition, not having a cohesive plan for how to disburse QGIS funds results in funding being done in a very ad hoc manner – which in turn results in a skew of funding towards development related activities and away from other critical project activities such as improvement of user documentation, API documentation, sysadmin tasks and so on.
3. To get things done that volunteers don’t naturally gravitate towards doing, such as housekeeping, maintenance and so on.
4. To transparently spend QGIS.ORG funds to advance the QGIS project.

In this funding round, we are ring-fencing EUR 20,000 for the grant programme. We expect to run further grant calls in the future if this round proves to be a success and as funds allow.

Applicants may submit more than one proposal and the proposal may be on any topic that you think is relevant and beneficial to the greater QGIS community. Some examples of the kinds of topics you could propose are:

• Updating and improving documentation
• Updating and improving QGIS.org web infrastructure
• Implementing a new feature in QGIS
• Curating the pull request queue
• Bug fixing
• Improving API documentation
• Improving the API and help making QGIS 3.0 a reality
• Rewriting and improving a part of the code base
• A security review of QGIS
• Helping new QGIS devs to get started with improved developer documentation and utilities
• etc.

The closing date for applications is Thursday, 15 September 2016

PLEASE NOTE: All applications made here will be PUBLICLY VISIBLE, including your name.

FAQ:

Here are a list of frequently asked questions relating to the grant call. Please check back on this article regularly – we will update it as any new questions are raised so that everyone may benefit from the answers.

1) Q: Are collaborative proposals allowed?

A: One person should be the proposal lead though. Additional collaborators can be mentioned in the proposal details section.

2) Q: Can I make a proposal for a smaller amount?

A: Yes

3) Q: Can I make a proposal for a larger amount?

A: No

4) Q: Can I charge VAT / additional expenses on top of the grant allocation?

A: No, the amount should be all-inclusive.

5) Q: How will the grant awards be decided?

A: Grant applications will be decided on by vote of the QGIS Board Voting Members

6) Q: Can the grant be made on behalf of my company or a group of people?

A: Yes. Just note that any application you make should be inclusive of all costs, VAT, Taxes etc.

7) Q: How many grants will be awarded from the 20,000 Euros?

A: We expect to award at minimum two grants, possibly more if there are a number of smaller grant proposals that are worthwhile.

8) Q: Can I make more than one application?

A: Yes

9) Q: Is this like Google Summer of Code – a mentorship programme?

A: No. We will not provide mentorship – we expect that you are already an established developer or contributors to the QGIS project and do not need any ‘hand holding’ other than via normal community consultation processes like QEP’s.

10) Q: I am thinking of submitting a proposal to do XYZ. Would that be considered a valid proposition?

A: We don’t have any specific pre-conceived ideas of what a valid proposal is, so I would encourage you to make a submission if you think it is worthwhile. During the decision about which proposals to access, we will consider factors like:

• how broadly useful the proposal is to all our users,
• how unlikely is it that the feature or improvement would be done without Grant funding,
• how much ‘value’ does the work bring to the project,
• how feasible is it that the applicant will actually achieve their goals etc.

11) Q: Have you thought of how to handle situations where person A submits a proposal and, later, person B submits the same proposal but cheaper?

A: In these cases, we will use criteria such as the applicant’s standing in the community, the technical details of their implementation plan, etc. Price would probably be a low-weighted factor but certainly could enter into it if there is a significant difference.

12) Q: I’ve read that QGIS 3 might land in first quarter of 2017 (if everything goes well). Do you expect proposals to be tied to QGIS 3? Should bug fixes, plugins, PyQGIS book translations, should they be planned, developed, and tested against QGIS 3’s code base?

A: Where proposals relate to the code base, yes we would expect that they are ‘3.0 ready’ – though they do not necessarily have to be completed when 3.0 is released.

13) Q: Do you have an indication of how long it will take for the grants to be awarded after the closing date?

A: It’s a bit hard for me to say how long it is going to take. The process will entail asking the QGIS voting community to rank all the proposals. Depending on how many proposals we receive we will need to allow for sufficient time of this to happen. We hope we can do it within a month of the closing date for applications but it we get a hundred proposals we will need more time probably….
Q: I still have questions, who can I ask?

A: Please contact [email protected] if you have further questions, or write to the pic mailing list.

How to apply:

To apply please use this online form

We’re happy to announce the release of QGIS 2.16.0 ‘Nødebo’. The University of Copenhagen’s Department of Geoscience and Natural Resource Management Forest and Landscape College in Nødebo were hosts to the First International QGIS conference and developer meeting in May 2015. For all of us who are not fluent in Danish, Lene Fischer has prepared the following video teaching us how to pronounce the release name:

QGIS 2.16 is not designated as a Long Term Release (LTR). Users wishing to have a version of QGIS which does not change and receives bug fixes for at least 1 year are invited to use the current LTR release 2.14.
If you are upgrading from QGIS 2.14 you will find a great many new features in this release.
Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of new bugs – if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker.

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please visit our sponsorship page for details. Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.

QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity. If you are able to support QGIS, you can donate here.

Time flies when you are having fun! It seems like only yesterday that I was writing about the 14th Hackfest in Gran Canaria. At the end of May 2016, we held the 15th QGIS hackfest! QGIS has been on an incredible journey since the project was started by Gary Sherman 14 years ago, and the fact that the hackfest was held in tandem with the 2nd QGIS International User conference is a testament to the growth and strength of the project.

2nd International QGIS Conference

Isn’t it amazing – we just held the second international QGIS User’s Conference! We really need to give credit to the amazing team who ran a totally seamless operation to organise the event: Gemma Pons, Toni Hernández, Josep Sitjar, Alexandre Busquets, Ferran Orduña, Rosa Olivella, Laura Olivas, & Lluís Vicens

We would like to give a special thank you to the University of Girona’s Director of GIS Service (SIGTE) – Gemma Boix who helped to organised the event as well as ensuring the institutional support for the event. In case I have missed mentioning someone by name, our thanks to all the other volunteers and the sponsors of the conference. Not only did the conference team host the conference event, they also covered a large part of the costs of the hackfest that followed the conference – for which we can’t thank them enough! OSGeo also supported the hack fest financially for which we are extremely grateful.

The conference team also extends their thanks to the attendees and presenters, instructors and developers who also actively participated on the event!  For those interested in viewing the various talks at the conference, here are some handy links:

• Sides from all talks
• Videos for conference presentations

State of QGIS

The QGIS.org project is in a very healthy state right now. For my talk at the user conference (video here) I got some fresh download stats from our servers and the numbers are quite astounding: QGIS 2.8 LTR (release Feb 2015) has been downloaded over 679, 000 times for the Windows Standalone installer (which includes all bug fix releases). Even after controlling for overestimates (from bot downloads, multiple downloads per user, “try and don’t use”) and underestimates (single downloads being distributed to many users) it is clear that we have an extremely large and constantly growing user base. By another metric, our most popular plugin, the OpenLayers plugin has been downloaded over 700 000 times!

Something else that is clear from the make up of the talks, workshop topics and attendees at the user conference and hackfest: QGIS is increasingly moving from single user environments to large multi-user deployments. This ‘edge of network effect’ is a common phenomenon in FOSS and is largely how Linux came to be such a lynchpin in the dev-ops world. Sys admins and (in the case of QGIS) GIS power users, test out the software on their own devices, see the potential for it in their workplace and start integrating it into their workflows in the office until eventually it has become a mission critical piece of software for an organisation.

One thing my slides probably do not make clear is that there is a huge amount of investment being made into QGIS and plugins for QGIS to fulfil a wide variety of needs. These investments are largely external to the project (i.e. not factored into the financial figures I mentioned in the talk) and happen in direct client-to-developer relationships completely bypassing (from a financial sense) the upstream  QGIS.ORG project. This is a really good model since we do not need to deal with contract delivery, competing interests etc.

If we do a simple calculation based on direct QGIS.org revenue for 2015/2016 (around EUR 69, 000) to downloads, the average revenue per download of QGIS 2.8.x was around EUR 0.10. All of the money we receive into the project goes into improving the QGIS, maintaining infrastructure and funding travel and accommodation for hackfests. I mention these numbers both because they are interesting and because it is good to emphasise how incredibly grateful we are to each and every one of our sponsors and donors that support the project. We really do run on a shoe-string budget and we have audacious goals and a vision to put spatial decision making tools into the hands of everyone on the planet who wants to use them. Your sponsorship and donations are a key enabler to making this vision a reality!

By the way, my apologies for not mentioning Gary Sherman (our project founder) by name at the start of my talk – that was totally unintentional! Before I talk about the main activities, let me make a quick aside to mention the small excursion we took:

Underwater autonomous vehicles & QGIS

One of the really cool things we did at the hackfest was take a little side trip to visit the Computer Vision and Robotics Institute. Natália Hurtós (who works for the institute) kindly gave a bunch of us QGIS geeks a tour. The work they are doing building [relatively] cheap underwater autonomous vehicles is really awesome and inspiring – all the more so because Natalia is planning to build the mission planning tool using QGIS libraries!

Ok so what actually happened at the hackfest? Lets dig in and find out!

Cool stuff from the QGIS Hackfest

I am only going to focus on the hackfest here because the videos from the talks at the QGIS User Conference have been posted online (see above), so you can take in all the QGIS goodness you like from those. There was a lot going on at the hackfest, so these are only the nuggets I managed to cherry-pick from the talks.

Give processing some love

During the hackfest and user conference, Victor Olaya (lead developer for the QGIS processing framework) really did a great job of promoting the idea of writing processing plugins rather than ‘normal’ plugins. His argument is that most plugins that are intended to provide single purpose analytical capabilities (we are looking at you geeks about to write the 300th buffer plugin!) would  be better off implemented as processing plugins:

• the plugin author would not need to spend valuable time writing user interfaces, input validators and so on.
• users of the plugins could chain the tool into complex workflows easily, rather than only being able to use it on a once off basis.
• we would grow the amount of options available in the processing toolbox while at the same time reducing the sometimes overwhelming amount of choice in the QGIS Plugin Manager.

ILWIS processing tools coming soon

Also on the topic of plugins, Bas Restsios from the ILWIS Project gave a demo of the ILWIS software in order for QGIS developers to be more aware of its capabilities. Although currently Windows only, the ILWIS developers are in the process of porting the software to be based on the Qt5 framework, which means us Linux and OSX users will get to enjoy using it too soon. ILWIS is Open Source and does its rendering using OpenGL. Because of their smart rendering system, everything draws lightning fast. ILWIS packs in many remote sensing tools and raster analysis tools and should be on anyone’s radar if they are interested in FOSSGIS. The best part (from my point of view) is that Bas and his team members are also busy creating a set of processing plugins for QGIS that call out to ILWIS’s command line tools. This means you can expect a huge leap forward in the number of raster based analysis functions you can do with QGIS in the near future.

GeoPackage, JPEG2000, WFS improvements

It was really great to have Even Rouault (maintainer of GDAL/OGR) present at the hackfest. Even recently received core committer rights to the QGIS code repository and has been making great contributions by adding support for the OGC Geopackage format (death to shapefiles!). The shapefile format is long in the tooth and doesn’t serve the GIS community well as a de facto standard for GIS data interchange. It also doesn’t make a good format for intermediate  representation of data processing outputs (e.g. when using multi algorithm processing models). Even has also been working on improvements to WFS support in QGIS which many will appreciate.

Not directly related to QGIS, but Even also mentioned he has been giving the GDAL driver for JPEG2000 some love – gaining good performance increases. This gives me some hope that there will be a viable open format alternative to ECW and MrSid in the future – something which QGIS will benefit from greatly. One of the interesting things that GDAL supports with the JPEG2000 specification is embedded vectors – you can write the raster with gdal_translate and then during creation pass a shapefile or GML stream to the gdal_translate command. I look forward to the day (not currently on the roadmap) where we can ship JP2 images with embedded vector masks and use those embedded vectors  seamlessly in QGIS.

Planning for 3.0 release

We did some planning for the 3.0 release of QGIS and, in particular, fine tuned the plans for how we will manage the transition from QGIS 2.x to 3.x. In February 2016 I posted an outline of the general approach we planned to follow. Some developers felt that we would be better off having the core of the 3.0 transition work happening on the master branch of QGIS so that it has more attention and testing focussed on it. I guess there are two main interest groups to consider here, so I will break down the outcome between take-home points for developers and general users:

For developers:

• 2.16 gets released off master.
• After 2.16 we create a 2x branch and the 2x branch will be put into caretaker mode.
• Support for Qt4 and Py2 will be discontinued in master and we do packaging only against Qt5 and Py3.
• Once Qt5 and Py3 only are supported in master, nightly build packages may not be immediately available on master as we need to get the packaging systems update.
• After 2.16 is released API breaking changes will be allowed in master (but code must build and packaging not broken, plugins will be broken).
• All API breaking changes should be annotated by means of a Doxygen page patch to indicate what changes were made.
• We target the API change window to end in Feb 2017 so that we can have a 3.0 release in March 2017.
• We may do a 2.18 release off the 2x branch  if there have been substantial changes in the 2x branch. If there are no substantial changes in the 2x branch following 2.16, we will not do a 2.18 release.
• In January 2017 we will have a review to establish if all the API breaking changes are complete. If someone has specific implementation plans that are in progress and they need more time, we will (under agreement from the dev community) extend the API breaking window and may push out the release date.
• Following the release of 3.0 we will implement API freeze again and polish up the codebase for an LTR release based on 3.2
• 2.14 LTR support will be extended until 3.2 is ready
• Note: for QGIS 3.x, a minimum of Qt 5.5 is recommended
• Note: for QGIS 3.x a minimum of Python 3.4 is recommended
• Note: We are looking for a volunteer to set up a  windows build system using vagrant on win 7 so that we can test and build automaticallyl

For General Users

We propose that for general users, you rather share the following more easy to digest bullet list as it does not contain all the technical details above that mainly developers will care about.

• 2.18 release is not guaranteed
• We are planning a 3.0 release in March 2017
• This release date may be postponed – we will do a review in January to establish whether we are on track for the release date
• The 3.0 release will break your plugins – we will publish a migration guide and tools to help you migrate your plugin to the new platform
• If you have any queries about the process please feel free to contact us (via the developer or user mailing lists preferably)

Style repository

Akbar Gumbira, our Google Summer of Code (GSOC) student joined us at the hackfest. For his GSOC project, Akbar is working on a unified way to share styles, symbols, ramps and markers in QGIS. The idea will be very similar to the QGIS plugin repository, where users can host their favourite cartographic elements for everyone else to enjoy. There was quite a lot of technical discussion about the exact mechanisms to use for hosting shared symbology with the key elements of the debate being about whether to use git as a hosting system, simple zip files or some other mechanism. If you wish to chat to Akbar about his work, visit this chat room or comment on the QEP.

OSX Packaging and Building

QGIS is an attractive proposition for OSX users since the big commercial vendors typically don’t support OSX. Since QGIS is built on cross platform technologies, this does not pose a huge limitation for us, but there are few OSX developers in the QGIS developer team and the platform requirements and constraints are pretty complex. Larry Shaffer has been doing awesome work to cut through the various issues and simplify the installation process – both for end users and for developers. It’s finally pretty easy to get a development environment up and running on a Mac now. Using brew (a package manager for OSX) you can install all the needed dependencies and get  QGIS compiling in Qt Creator with full debugging support. The next challenge is going to be supporting this under Qt5 for QGIS 3.0 and Larry has been doing a bunch of great work to make that happen.

Lizmap!

There are several web client frontends for QGIS out there. Lizmap is probably the most feature rich of them. Michaël Douchin (@kimaidou on twitter) showed off the latest version of Lizmap. If you are doing any web mapping, you really should check it out!

QField

Marco Bernasocchi showed off the work they have been doing on QField – an Android app for your mobile device. The workflow for using QField is simple: Create a QGIS project on your desktop, copy it over to your device’s SD Card or internal storage, then open the same project on your device. Since it uses the same QGIS 2.14 backend as you are probably running on your desktop, all the cartographic elements from your desktop are supported – including the new 2.5D rendering. The main use case for QField is field data collection and new in QField is the ability to capture point data and edit / update feature attributes. This opens many possibilities for asset management and field survey work.

Marco shared some roadmap plans for QField including broader support for form elements. Value maps are already implemented, value relations, date and picture support are coming soon!. There is also beta support for digitising lines which should land in your installed version soon. I am eagerly looking forward to seeing how QField develops!

During the hackfest I did some testing of QFied using a PostGIS layer in a project with the data coming from a remote QGIS server – and it works (assuming you have internet connectivity). I also did some testing using BTSync to create a synchronised file system between my mobile device and my desktop. Edits to layers on the desktop and the mobile device can easily be pushed back and forth, making it very very easy to push out maps and new data to workers in the field.

Testing

There were lots of interesting things going on for those interested in testing. Alessandro Pasotti showed off some really cool stuff he has been working on for running python tests directly in QGIS instead of using a mock QGIS iface object. There are huge benefits to doing this since your tests run in  a ‘real’ QGIS environment. He also showed off how they are testing QGIS plugins in Docker using the above mentioned technique.

If you do need / want to use an mock iface object, Matthias Kuhn has been promoting the use of the new qgis.testing python module improvements which includes an iface object which is comprehensive in terms of API stubs. For pythonistas:

from qgis.testing import start_app, unittest 

Matthias has also created a unittest subclass that you can use which includes nice goodies like letting you do asserts that geometries match.

Matthias Kuhn, Nyall Dawson and others have really been leading the charge to build a more comprehensive test suite in QGIS and there were lots of other interesting tips and tricks been shown like how to make your travis tests run against multiple versions of QGIS – which can be very handy for plugin authors.

Victor Olaya also showed off the tester plugin – for automated GUI testing based on recorded interaction sequences.

Nice things for developers

Martin Dobias showed off some of the tools they have been developing including:

• The report plugin (see http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/report/) that lets you trap python exceptions and send a bug report directly to a github issue tracker.
• Martin also showed of the First Aid plugin which lets you capture tracebacks in a more elegant way and also debug your plugin, stepping through the code and execute python instructions in the current run context. The First AID plugin makes a great alternative to using remote debugging from an IDE which is time consuming to set up and technical for less experienced developers to do.

Training plugin

Victor Olaya showed of a plugin (the Lessons plugin) they are working on to facilitate interactive training in QGIS. It uses a simple dock interface to guide the user through a series of activities. Interestingly you can ask it to play recorded macros (saved as python code) of the active being explained so that you can see how it is done if you can’t figure it out yourself. Their authoring system also allows you to record these  macros.

Docker

Docker is increasingly becoming a useful building block for those wishing to deploy QGIS in server side contexts. Patrick Valsecchi and Stéphane Brunner did some really awesome work refactoring the QGIS Server docker image – you can get a preview here  https://github.com/pvalsecc/QGIS/tree/docker (read the README for usage notes). Patrick’s work strips down the size of the docker image to make it much less of an overhead to pull the image. We would like to eventually merge this into the upstream QGIS repo so that we have a versioned docker build set up for each QGIS release.

Crayfish

Martin Dobias showed off the Crayfish plugin. Crayfish includes some really awesome multi temporal visualisation tools – really useful if you have time slice data in NetCDF or similar formats and you want to view layers sequentially as animations. It also has cool symbology additions to show flow / directionality arrows over your raster.

GeoNode QGIS Server Demo

Etienne Trimaille demonstrated the work he, Ismail Sunni and Rizky Maulana have been doing to implement a QGIS Server backend for GeoNode. GeoNode is a spatial content management system that allows you to easily upload and share geospatial data on the web. With their implementation you can upload a shape file or TIFF along with a QGIS .qml style file and the layer is published directly as a tile service in the original QGIS styling. Bye-bye hard do create SLD’s, hello easy to create QGIS styles. (Disclaimer: I work with Etienne, Ismail and Rizky so I am tooting our own horn a bit here).

Documentation

The work of the documentation team is often overlooked in the frenzy to enjoy the new cool stuff that developers churn out. Take a look over at the documentation GitHub pulse page to see how just as much effort is going on in the documentation work. During the hackfest Yves Jacolin and the rest of the documentation team were hard at work getting things ready for the next QGIS Manual release. If you are able to lend a hand with the documentation effort (no coding skills required), please do contact Otto Dassau, the QGIS Documentation Lead!

Lightning talks

Here is also a quick-fire list of features that were shown off -that are coming down the QGIS conveyor belt – mostly for QGIS 2.16 but also new plugins and other efforts:

• Style dock in QGIS 2.16 with undo / redo – Nathan Woodrow
• Dynamic hillside rendering – Nathan Woodrow
• Awesome new gradient editor – Nyall Dawson
• D3 & Plotly charting with chart interaction showing on the layer – Matteo Ghetta and Michael Douchin
• Forms improvements: the ‘drag and drop’ editor will support multiple columns – Matthias Kuhn
• Table view will be able to filter which columns to show (to let you hide unwanted columns) – Matthias Kuhn
• Action widget columns in the attribute table: you can place one or more action widgets (and icons) into the attribute table making it very easy to fire off an action (e.g. python script) for a particular record – Matthias Kuhn
• Support for changing column order display in attribute table – Matthias Kuhn
• In composer you can get have JSON of all layer relations that you can use in your html widget – Nyall Dawson
• Aggregation in expressions. We will explain this more in the visual changeling for the next release, but you will be able to compute attribute aggregates (e.g. sum of areas) in your reports – Nyall Dawson
• Default values for fields – Matthias Kuhn showed upcoming work to add support for field defaults in when adding a new record to a vector layer.
• Transaction groups / cascaded editing mode when you are editing a feature so that related tables get put into edit mode (project property needs to be enabled) – again we will explain this more in the upcoming 2.16 changelog – Matthias Kuhn
• SectorPlot plugin: a plugin to let you make ‘pizza plots’ of your data – Raymond Nijssen and Richard Duivenvoorde
• Denis Rouzaud showed off work he has been doing to create a standard settings dialog that you can use in your plugins. It has support for different input types and layer chooser etc. They provide a settings dialog base class that you can derive from in your plugin which will take care of reading and writing your settings to Settings.
• User profiles plugin – lets you create customised user interface for different user categories – Alex Bruy
• Georeferenced PDFs and outputs from composer (sorry not yet GeoPDF) but you can use composer to create a  PDF – and then add that into QGIS just like any other raster layer. Nyall Dawson
• Nyall Dawson chatted about his work on QGIS Task manager – a tool to let you easily create concurrent background tasks and show the progress of each task in a simple UI. I believe he is looking for funding to help him get this finished, so if you are interested please contact him.
• Bivariate legends plugin (not published yet).  Thomas Gratier showed off work he is doing to support the creation of bivariate legends.

Albireo QGIS Fork

Sandro Mani showed off an awesome new QGIS front end they have been working on at Sourcepole. Their implementation creates a brand dew ribbon based UI paradigm for QGIS (don’t scoff, it’s actually pretty cool!). They have pared down the number of features and grouped functionality into discrete areas, both the menus and ribbon icons changing based on the context of what you are doing. You can see the source code here: https://github.com/sourcepole/kadas-albireo.  Here are some bullet notes I made while watching his presentation:

• 3D Globe updates to get it ready for production use. They have also integrated the 3D extrusion support and lots of improvements to the globe that Matthias Kuhn did as part of his masters thesis. Its really exciting to think that these improvements may make their way into the official QGIS builds sometime soon and we can all enjoy them.
• Redlining – you can sketch onto the map without saving those geometries in a specific layer.
• Measuring & profile tools
• Shift-drag for zoom – just like you can do in OpenLayers and Leaflet (Nyall then went and added this to QGIS for 2.16 – yay!)
• Switch coordinate reference systems used for cursor position display easily from the status bar

There were many other cool features – some of them may make their way into the mainstream QGIS desktop. If you are looking to support users who need a simplified QGIS user interface, Albireo QGIS spin off is something to watch.

Conclusion

Girona was an absolutely awesome venue for the QGIS Conference and Hackfest. I hope the participants of the conference gained good benefit from the experience. The hackfest had around 50 participants and beyond the above notes, there was such a lot going on including work on the documentation system, discussions on the proposed community voter system (more on that in a follow up blog post) and many other things. I really encourage you to attend these events if you want to keep track of the leading edge of QGIS developers.

One thing we have been encountering lately in the QGIS project is plugin authors not understanding the licensing requirements for publishing their QGIS plugins. In this article I will try to clarify this a little:

QGIS is Open Source Software and provides a great platform for third parties to distribute additional functionality to users through our plugin system. QGIS is licensed under the GPL version 2 or greater. This license is provided with every copy of the QGIS and in the source code and is available on our web site here:

http://docs.qgis.org/2.0/en/docs/user_manual/appendices/appendices.html

Under the terms of this license, it is a requirement that all plugins distributed via http://plugins.qgis.org (or through other repositories that may be self-hosted) should comply with the GPL version 2 or greater license. In particular all code included in any plugin should be made clearly and easily available in source form. It has come to our attention that some plugin authors are distributing plugins that do not comply with this condition.

We ask you to consider the fact that many thousands of hours of work and large amounts of financial outlay from individuals and companies has gone into the creation of QGIS. This work is done under the basis that in-kind contributions raise the quality and capabilities of the platform for everyone. When you create a plugin, you only need to spend a minimal amount of effort to solve your specific requirements because we have done the rest of the work needed to provide an entire platform for you and our community of users. This is a key value proposition of Open Source: ‘a rising tide floats all boats’.

By publishing the source code for your plugin, others may inspect the underlying code of your plugin and learn from it and use that knowledge to further improve the platform. Not releasing your source code breaks this model. Besides being a contravention of the licensing conditions under which you received the QGIS software, withholding your source code does not advance the body shared knowledge, and does not embrace the spirit of sharing that has made the QGIS project such a success to date.

Thus if you are a plugin author who is distributing your plugin without the accompanying source code, you need to be aware that the source code needs to be made available to each person who receives the binary sources for your plugin.

One query that plugin authors have raised is whether the requirement to publish the sources of their plugin precludes their ability to sell or otherwise commercially benefit from their plugin work. This is not the case – you can sell you plugin as long as you make  the sources of your plugin available under the same license as QGIS to each purchaser.

Should you have any queries about how to better collaborate within the QGIS community we are available to you – please direct your queries to [email protected]

Over the years, QGIS has gained more functionality, more users and more people and organisations who make their livelihood from it. As an Open Source project, there are two things that we value most highly (and equally):

• Our community of users
• Our community of project contributors

The two groups are intermingled, co-dependent and indispensable to the project. As both these groups have grown, our reach has grown. Now as a project we touch the lives of (by best estimation) hundreds of thousands of users and contributors around the world.

It is a natural consequence of such reach that QGIS has become an attractive platform for companies on which to build service based business models to their customers. From this rises the advent of ‘enterprise’ offerings – service packages tailored for large corporate and government institutions which need service level agreements, guaranteed turn around times, helpdesk support and so on. As a volunteer driven, grass roots project we are not in the position to, and do not have the interest in catering to this class of user base via support agreements etc. Commercial support is far better taken care of through third party service providers that have the infrastructure and legal means to set up such service offerings.

As the momentum grows around such enterprise services it is probably an inevitable consequence that tension may arise between third party service providers and the QGIS core project. In simplistic terms this tension can be seen as the dichotomy between those of us who view our work on QGIS as a labour of love versus those who see their work around QGIS as a labour of commercial enterprise. Of course there are many cases where the people providing such support do come from the community, do see their work as a labour of love, but as the stakes get higher and the size of support companies grows (to the point where they are also recruiting staff from outside the QGIS community), there is more opportunity for this dichotomy to realise itself.

The reality is that much like the relationship between project contributors and our community of users, there is a huge amount of potential symbiosis between the QGIS developer community and the growing number of value added resellers providing services around QGIS: many of the improvements, bug fixes and other enhancements produced by value added resellers make their way back into the core QGIS offering, whilst the body of work produced by the community of QGIS project contributors becomes the basis around which value added resellers build their marketplace offering.

Over the years we have tried to be sensitive to the fact that many people rely on QGIS for their livelihood – initiatives such as our Long Term Release programme, the creation of test suites and heavy investment of donated project funds into bug fixing (among many other similar initiatives) have all gone a long way to making QGIS a viable platform for value added resellers. We would like to ask that resellers give the QGIS project similar consideration in their marketing and work endeavours. As such I would like to present a few simple guidelines below that you should use as guiding principles in your interaction with the QGIS project. I will use a hypothetical company ‘ACME Corp.’ in my examples below:

Respect the license

QGIS is published under the GPL v2 or greater license. The letter of the license states that if you extend the source code  of QGIS, and publish those changes (for example by making it available on a download site for your users), you need to publish the source code changes too, making them available to your users. In the spirit of the license, you should share your improvements to QGIS with the greater project (e.g. by making your code tree publicly accessible).

Similarly when publishing a plugin, don’t ship it with proprietary binary ‘blobs’, or only with .pyc (compiled python files) leaving out the original python sources. If you do absolutely have to ship it with a binary (for example you need a c-compiled python module for your plugin), make sure to provide a clear trail to the upstream sources for those binary elements.

I personally find discussions of licensing get quickly tedious and I prefer to emphasise the spirit of open source rather than getting stuck in legalese: “We share our work with you, you share your work with us and we all benefit“. It’s really that simple for me. When you stray from this maxim, you are very likely to, at best, ruffle feathers and, at worst, create a really bad impression about your company and the people that work for it.

Don’t present your work as our work

It seems obvious, but many miss the nuance here. If you wrote a marvellous plugin to count sheep in farm fields because it will add great value to your customers, call it ‘ACME. Corp sheep counter’, not ‘QGIS Sheep Counter’. Also bear in mind that the word ‘QGIS’ is trademarked (the trademark is owned by the QGIS.org community). If you want to name your project, you should read our trademark guidelines. Contact us at [email protected] if you have any uncertainty about how you are using the word ‘QGIS’ in your brand.

Don’t present our work as your work

This is the corollary to the above. Our community works incredibly hard to make QGIS, the web site, the documentation, triage bugs, provide help on the mailing lists and forums. All that effort can be disregarded in a single line of careless copy like ‘QGIS by ACME Corp. is the next best thing since sliced cheese‘. Show a little love to the people that built the platform for your service offering and refer back to the parent QGIS project and its community as the progenitor of all the goodness you are sharing with your clients. That does not denigrate the valuable service that you provide your customers and it lets them know that you represent your company and work fairly and contribute back to the source project that you are basing your services on.

Friends don’t fork

Forking in Open Source is the process by which you create your own divergent copy of the  software and maintain it independently, often resulting in two incompatible versions (at the source code level) of the same project. Nobody really wins from that. Your customers lose the ability to migrate projects, workflows and knowledge between the community maintained version of QGIS and your modified one. In reality forking is normal (its the standard workflow in GitHub for example), but I really am referring to the process whereby you create an heavily diverged copy of the source code. When you create a divergent fork, your developers get stuck in a one directional highway which takes them further and further away from the original code base and any opportunity to capitalise on the work of other contributors from the QGIS community. There is also an economic imperative not to make a divergent fork – to quote community member Vincent Picavet:

“… forking a project is not a good idea in terms of economics. Maintaining software is more than half of the TCO [Total Cost of Ownership], and on the medium-long term, maintaining a fork of QGIS will cost much more than integrating the specific code into the master codebase, even if initial costs are higher for master integration.”

Don’t rebrand

Every few months I get an email from a value added service provider asking me if I can help them produce a version of QGIS which is rebranded as ‘ACME Corp. GIS’. By rebranding here I mean deep rebranding – not just replacing the splash screen (which I am generally OK with), but changing the word ‘QGIS’ everywhere in the source code and user interface to ‘ACME Corp. GIS’.  Beyond the fact that you instantly break all sorts of things like QGIS project file support, you also create a fork that will require massive amounts of maintenance  to keep in sync with the upstream project.

Integrate your team with the QGIS community

One great way to give your clients a good service and to ensure that your work is well accepted is to integrate your developers with the QGIS community. By that I mean let them subscribe to our mailing lists, participate in architecture and other discussions, fix issues, contribute code, attend our 6 monthly hackfests and generally be part of the ebb and flow of the project. There are so many benefits to doing this – both to QGIS and yourself – which is probably evidenced by the fact that the most well known QGIS value added service providers each have a number of developers participating in the community. My main motivation above all other reasons is that they will gain the sensitivity to know how to get your improvements integrated into the code base, and the trust and camaraderie of the other community members which is great when the time comes that they need help solving problems.

Integrate your work with the QGIS code base

Whereas above we ask you not to fork, how can you be sure your changes will be acceptable so that you do not need to maintain a fork? Whenever you are thinking about new features for your clients, I encourage you to think about how to make them generic enough that they can be incorporated into the main code base. Once you do that, you have an automatic delivery platform of your work to your users. QGIS has a well established release routine and the features shipped with QGIS get tested and used by many thousands of users. Besides you are benefitting from the features others are funding, why not pay the same compliment back by designing your features in a way that everyone can use them, not only your clients?

Keep us in the loop

There is so much going on around the QGIS project we often get surprised by things people do. More often than not it is a pleasant surprise but sometimes it isn’t. If you are planning some big new feature or creating a new service around QGIS, I highly recommend that you share it with the community early in your planning process. In particular for the case of new features that you would like to see in the main code base, coming along with an ACME Corp. 10,000 line code contribution with no prior consultation creates ample room for friction. If you want to know that a larger feature you are planning will be accepted, check out our QEP (QGIS Enhancement Proposal) process.

Don’t only contribute code

For some reason coders are treated as the main heros in the story of an Open Source project. Many people overlook the fact that there is a far larger team of translators, document writers, sys admins, authors, artists, testers and enthusiasts who contribute a massive amount of effort into the project. When you are thinking about how to contribute back to the project, take a moment to think about all the infrastructure around the project and how you might help that along – as well as the cool new features you plan to contribute to the code base.

There are many other things that you can do to integrate yourself into the community, but my real point in this article is that although QGIS is Free Software, it is not made for free. Take a look at the QGIS page on Ohloh if you want to get a feel for just how much effort has gone into QGIS. Many people have put a lot of sweat equity into QGIS and the only reward they get for their work (if they are lucky) is recognition and appreciation. Think of them when you build services on top of QGIS and find ways to acknowledge and motivate them!

Here’s looking forward to seeing many thousands of people making their livelihood by offering services around QGIS!

Tim Sutton

(QGIS Project Chair)

QGIS is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System that runs on Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, and Windows.

We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.14 ‘Essen’.  Essen was the host city to our developer meet ups in October 2012 and 2014.

Long Term Release

This is a special release since it is designated an ‘LTR’ (Long Term Release). LTR releases will be supported with backported bug fixes for one year, and will be in permanent feature freeze (i.e. no new features will be added, only bug fixes and trivial updates). Note that we are in discussion to extend the term of our LTR releases to two years, but for technical reasons we will not do this until QGIS 3.2.

The purpose of LTR releases is to provide a stable and less frequently changing platform for enterprises and organizations that do not want to deal with updating user skills, training materials etc. more than once per year. The success of the LTR is very much down to you, our beloved users – we need your support to help funding bug fixes and making sure in your support contracts with support providers specify that any bug fixes done on your behalf are applied to the LTR branch as well as our normal development branch.

If an LTR is important to you, please consider also directly supporting the QGIS project, or encourage your commercial provider to use LTR as a basis for your enterprise solution so that everyone may benefit from a stable platform that is being continuously improved and refined. Note that for users and organizations that like to live on the frontier, our regular four monthly releases will continue unabated.

New Features in QGIS 2.14 ‘Essen’

If you are upgrading from QGIS 2.8 (our previous LTR version) you will find a
great many new features in this release. (http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog214/)

We encourage you to peruse the changelogs for the intermediate non LTR 2.10 and 2.12 releases as this QGIS 2.14 includes all features published in those releases too.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog212/)
(http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog210/)

Note that 2.14 first enters the regular package repositories and will not immediately replace 2.8 in the LTR package repositories. That will happen when 2.16 is released.

Whenever new features are added to software they introduce the possibility of new bugs – if you encounter any problems with this release, please file a ticket on the QGIS Bug Tracker. (http://hub.qgis.org)

The source code and binaries for Windows, Debian and Ubuntu are already available via the large download link on our home page: http://qgis.org.  More packages will follow as soon as the package maintainers finish their work. Please revisit the page if your platform is not available yet.

Thanks

We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!

QGIS is supported by donors and sponsors. A current list of donors who have
made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our
donors list.  If you would like to become and official project sponsor, please
visit our sponsorship page for details.
(http://qgis.org/en/site/about/sponsorship.html)

Current Sponsors of QGIS:

Sponsoring QGIS helps us to fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts. A complete list of current sponsors is provided below – our very great thank you to all of our sponsors!

SILVER AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland
SILVER Sourcepole AG, Switzerland
SILVER GAIA mbH, Germany
SILVER Office of Public Works, Flood Risk Management and Data Management
       Section, Ireland
SILVER Land Vorarlberg, Austria
BRONZE 2D3D.GIS, France
BRONZE Cawdor Forestry, United Kingdom
BRONZE ChameleonJohn, United States
BRONZE Chartwell Consultants Ltd., Canada
BRONZE Gis3W, Italy
BRONZE Dr. Kerth + Lampe Geo-Infometric GmbH, Germany
BRONZE Gaia3D, Inc., South Korea
BRONZE GeoSynergy, Australia
BRONZE GFI – Gesellschaft für Informationstechnologie mbH, Germany
BRONZE GKG Kassel, (Dr.-Ing. Claas Leiner), Germany
BRONZE HostingFacts.com, Estonia
BRONZE Lutra Consulting, United Kingdom
BRONZE MappingGIS, Spain
BRONZE Nicholas Pearson Associates, United Kingdom
BRONZE QGIS Polska, Poland
BRONZE Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, United Kingdom
BRONZE TerreLogiche, Italy
BRONZE Trage Wegen vzw, Belgium
BRONZE Urbsol, Australia
BRONZE GIS-Support, Poland
ADLARES GmbH, Germany
BRONZE WhereGroup GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
BRONZE www.molitec.it, Italy
BRONZE www.argusoft.de, Germany
BRONXE Customer Analytics, USA
BRONZE Nicholas Pearson Associates
QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity. If you are able to support QGIS, you can donate using this link : http://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/donations.html

Happy QGISing!

Regards,

The QGIS Team!

The Call for Papers and Workshops for the 2nd International QGIS User and Developer Conference, is still open!

Call for Presentations
Deadline: February 22nd

The QGIS Conference presentations are 20 minutes long, with time for Q&A at the end of each talk. Presentations may cover any aspect related with the use or development of QGIS software. Anyone can can submit a presentation proposal and take part in the conference as a presenter. The received proposals will be reviewed by the program committee.

See already submitted presentations and details: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/conferencia-qgis/

Call for Workshops
Deadline: February 22nd

There are two kinds of workshops depending on the duration: 2 hours or 4 hours. If you want to actively participate in the 2nd Int. QGIS Conference and impart a workshop, don’t hesitate to send your workshop proposal to [email protected]

The proposal should be a brief abstract pointing out the expected duration of the workshop (2 hours, 4 hours) as well as a few lines describing the content of the workshop, pre-requisites for the attendants (if needed), name of the instructor…

The instructors of the selected workshops will receive a free pass for the conference.

See already submitted workshops and details: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/workshops-qgis/

For further details, please send an email at [email protected]

Ok so quick spoiler here: there is no QGIS 3.0 ready yet, nor will there be a QGIS 3.0 for some time. This article provides a bit more detail on the plans for QGIS 3.0. A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the considerations for the 3.0 release, so you may want to read that first before continuing with this article as I do not cover the same ground here.

A lot of consideration has gone into deciding what the approach will be for the development of QGIS 3.0. Unfortunately the first PSC vote regarding which proposal to follow was a split decision (4 for, 3 against, 1 abstention and 1 suggestion for an alternative in the discussion). During our PSC meeting this week we re-tabled the topic and eventually agreed on Jürgen Fischer’s proposal (Jürgen is a QGIS PSC Member and the QGIS Release Manager) by a much more unanimous margin of 8 for, 1 neutral and 1 absent. Jürgen’s proposal is largely similar to the Proposal 2 described in my previous posting. I want to make some special notes here about our discussion and subsequent decision which will hopefully help to clarify the thinking behind our decision for other interested observers.  First let me lay out Jürgen’s plan in his own words:

“My preferred approach would still be:

• Do a Qt5/PyQt5/Python3 branch in parallel, actually work on it until it’s ready, make it master and release it as 3.0
• Meantime keep working on master (2.x) and keep releasing them every 4 months as usual

Everyone can work on the branch (s)he wants (or is hired to), but needs to consider if (s)he want to do it (or spend funds on):

• only for 2.x: knowing that it will be released soon; but might become unusable because platforms drop support for stuff it depends on sooner or later
• only for 3.x: not knowing when that will ever release or
• for both: knowing that work needs to be done twice.
• People adding features to the master branch will be responsible to ensure that their work gets merged to 3.0 branch.

As PSC we should maintain the environment for people to do something for QGIS – but we cannot tell them to – so we don’t have resources we can actually plan with and that means we can either release something when the big thing is ready or what we have in fixed intervals.” – Jürgen Fischer

What follows are some further details and clarifications to our preferred approach:

Why do parallel development?

Parallel development of 3.0 maintaining our master branch with 2.x code in it has advantages and disadvantages. First the advantages:

• If we encounter major technical difficulties / release blockers in the 3.0 branch, it will not impact on our normal 3 monthly release cycle.
• Our binary build systems (Linux, Windows and OSX binaries) will be unaffected until 3.0 is ready.
• It is very likely that building 3.0 binaries on different platforms is going to have difficulties for each platform. For example OSGEO4W has no Python3 and Qt5 packages yet. Someone needs to see to the creation of the required package as a separate exercise from the actuals development of a version of QGIS that will take advantage of these updated libraries. We don’t yet know what problems may be in countered in preparing these.
• “Don’t break what already works”: we have a working and relatively stable master branch and we don’t want to do a ‘cowboy stunt’ and break it. We prefer to wait until the 3.0 branch is mature, has passing tests and is known to work well before merging it into master and treating it as our ‘best we currently have’ master branch.

Of course nothing in life is completely easy, there are also some disadvantages:

• Some developers may feel that running two mainstream branches is dilution of effort. To counter this, our public recommendation is that after 2.16 comes out, all QGIS contributors are strongly encouraged to provide their patches against the 3.0 branch. Any features applied to the master branch is not guaranteed to be part of the 3.0 release.
• Regular merging of master to the 3.0 branch may prove more and more difficult over time as the two branches diverge more. Again we will strongly encourage that developers submitting new features after the 2.16 release do so against the 3.0 branch.
• 3.0 branch won’t have auto build system for nightly binaries in the beginning. Since we expect that the initial branch of 3.0 will break these anyway, Having a separate branch is actually an advantage here as it will give binary packages some time to get their build systems up to speed.

To clarify things for developers wondering where to commit their work: we discourage people from writing new features in master after 2.16 is released and rather ask them to make their changes in the 3.0 branch. Only those who really need to see their features in the next 2.18 release would have to dual commit.

Isn’t it better to work on 3.0 in the master branch?

Some queries have been raised about whether it would be better to rather work on 3.0 in the ‘master branch’ and relegate the 2.x code base to a side branch (instead of our intended approach which is to keep master tracking 2.x until 3.0 is ready and then merge it to master). We feel that keeping master tracking the 2.x code base is more conservative – it will not break existing packaging / build systems and if there is any major hitch in 3.0 development the release process will continue unabated based on the 2.x code set. While 3.0 is under development, package builders will have time to figure out the packaging process while still keeping the regular nightly builds against 2.x running. The implication of this is that 2.18 may contain only bug fixes which were applied to the 2.x branch and no significant new features.

The schedule will not be fixed

One thing that we want to make really clear (and was a key point in our many discussions) is that there will be no fixed release date for QGIS version 3.0. There are several reasons for this:

• As a steering committee, we can only set the QGIS ship pointing in a given direction, our power to actually make work happen is extremely limited. This is because we are a community made up largely of volunteer developers or developers working on a commission basis for third party clients. We have no say in how these contributors spend their time.
• We do not yet know which (if any) major technical issues will be encountered during the development of 3.0. Any such issues could very well delay the roll out of QGIS 3.0.

Instead our plan is to make the 2.16 release and then effectively move all developer effort to the 3.0 branch as best we can (through close liaison with our developer community).

To clarify things for those wondering when they will give 3.0 to their users: The actual release date for 3.0 its interterminate, but the general aim is still to try to encourage everyone to get it ready for 1 year from now. Remember that as an open source community we cannot directly ensure that project timelines are met since our developer force is largely volunteer based or work according to their own companies agendas.

Will 3.0 be a Long Term Release (LTR)?

It is our recommendation that we wait until 3.2 is ready before designating it an LTR – there are going to be large changes in the code base for 3.0 and we would rather stabilise things a bit before applying the LTR label to the release.

Looking forward to 3.0

Personally I am very much looking forward to the release of QGIS 3.0 – it represents another huge milestone in our project, it affords us a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of cruft out of our code base and API’s and it will arm us with a set of modern, new libraries that will see us through the next several years. Rock on QGIS 3.0!

QGIS PSC Chairman

Dear QGIS developers

This year, just like in the previous years, we will have two developer-centric hackfests, where we invite coders, documenters, testers, graphic artists, translators, and anyone else who is interested in improving QGIS for the benefit of all our users:

May 27th-29th in Girona, Spain

… right after the 2nd International QGIS User and Developer Conference and the Jornadas SIG Libre, and

August 21st-23rd & 27th-28th in Bonn, Germany

… together with the FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint before and after the conference

The QGIS hackfests are an important aspect of the project, playing a key role in facilitating collaboration and planning within the community of developers and contributors who combine their efforts to put out three releases of QGIS each year. We rely on the goodwill and sponsorship of our grateful users and their host organisations to financially sustain the QGIS project. If you are in a position of influence, we ask you to please consider sponsoring QGIS to support this hackfest and other project related activities.

We look forward to seeing you all there!

The QGIS Team