The life of open source spatial with QGIS: Hobby to grown up, with growing pains
summary
Project starts as hobby GIS viewer and grows into a near-production platform: 1 million lines of C++ plus 500k UI XML, 170 contributors, structured releases and installers that finally cover Windows, Mac and Linux. Migration to Qt5 and Python3 causes painful API breakage, but funded maintenance — about €76,000 on bug fixes and €150k income in 2018 — pays for packaging, upstream GDAL/PROJ fixes and QA, trading rapid change for predictability and wider adoption.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21In the beginning...
- 2:41One of the biggest open source GIS software packages
- 3:30More frequent and stable release cycles
- 4:001,712,306 total lines of code 908,668 lines of C++ 152,298 lines of Python 480,429 lines of XML??!
- 6:08Let's talk about installers
- 6:44Making installers is hard Be kind to your project package maintainers
- 7:03We have had communication breakdowns around installers
- 8:36Lots of people use and rely on QGIS for daily work
- 8:58Stability is important to everyone
- 11:02Avoid breaking changes
- 12:03What happens when it is no longer a hobby project?
- 15:24Drawing the line between volunteering and getting paid
- 16:33Developer vs User expectations will differ
- 18:49Sponsor your favourite project Not just QGIS
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