The life of open source spatial with QGIS - From hobby to grown up, with bonus growing pains
summary
QGIS starts in 2002 as a hobby PostGIS viewer and grows into a cross‑platform desktop GIS that layers GDAL/OGR, PROJ, Qt and Python, with almost a million lines of C++ plus growing Python and plugins. Growth forces formal governance (PSC and board), predictable long term release (LTR) support, paid bug‑fix rounds and sustaining members funding, paid work to fix macOS packaging, and hard transitions like QT4→QT5 migration and Python 3 that break many plugins and shrink the plugin author base.
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chapters (39)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:36Geographic Informatio n System
- 1:18Sits on top of other major open source projects
- 1:40GDAL Proj Python
- 2:14Let's go back to the start
- 3:31Started only as a Post GIS** viewer
- 3:49Started as a hobby project
- 6:40One of the biggest open source cross platform GIS software applications
- 6:55Part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation
- 7:26No longer just a PostGIS viewer
- 7:45Large friendly community of users and developers
- 8:47More frequent and stable release cycles
- 8:591,712,306 total lines of code 908,668 lines of C++ 152,298 lines of Python 480,429 lines of XML??!
- 9:59Documentation doesn't write itself
- 10:57Growing pain: Installers
- 11:18You can't just do source dumps
- 12:46We have had communication breakdowns around installers
- 13:27Growing pain: Breaking changes
- 15:09It was for the better but hurt
- 15:48Growing pain: Documentation
- 16:12Keeping up with rate of change is hard
- 17:12Focus on stabilizing
- 17:22Lots of people use and rely on QGIS for daily work
- 19:56Stability is important to everyone
- 20:17Forming governance
- 20:56Established PSC
- 22:03Rebanding and trademarks
- 22:55Have a way to take money
- 27:37Drawing the line between volunteering and getting paid
- 28:27Grant projects
- 29:26Growing the community
- 30:07Be welcoming to new members
- 30:36Diversity in location Diversity in gender Diversity in skills etc etc
- 32:00Be aware of other cultures
- 33:50Mentor and promote into core members of the community
- 34:42Developer vs User expectations will differ
- 34:55The community can fragment
- 36:15Community matters a lot
- 36:37Support your favourite project
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