On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 11:41 AM, Agustin Lobo <alobolis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> will put a significant part of their paid time on debugging, enhancing and > extending QGIS. This is the case of R, which is, i my opinion, the paramount > example of success of public domain software, at least in science. [legal note] R (and Qgis) is not 'public domain software'. 'Public domain' is a legal term that generally means out of copyright and with no usage restrictions. R and the packages in CRAN are under a variety of open-source licenses including the GPL, and are copyright of various authors and institutions - it is this copyright that allows authors to place works under the GPL. [ends] My 2 euros: Packages are accepted into CRAN only if they pass various QC checks and if they have an active maintainer. If a maintainer gives up on a package it disappears from CRAN. This doesn't happen often since an outgoing maintainer will advertise and a keen user will take it up. Qgis is similar - Clearly a problem with a plugin in a third-party repo is not a Qgis issue, and shouldn't be tracked in the qgis trac. If the developer doesn't fix it then it's open source -- the user can fix it themselves or pay to get it fixed. Plugins in the qgis repo are a qgis problem, and if they can't be fixed by maintainers then should be 'orphaned'. Your problem with a student having trouble getting their coursework done because of a software bug also occurs in proprietary software but worse - I've seen bugs - serious bugs - in a proprietary stats package go unfixed for years. Just trying to find a place to report bugs is often impossible. I had to resort to emailing an old friend who worked for the company after being unable to find a bug report email address on their website. I suspected the company thought their program had no bugs. Try finding a bug tracker or support forum for SPSS even today! The situation with R is often that the gap between developer and user is very small. Packages are often written because that person wants to use a particular functionality (often from theory they have developed). With Qgis mostly the theory is well-developed (raster algebra, geometry calculations) and users just want to use it, and the motivation for developers is less since they can probably do it all in Grass anyway. Actually I don't know what drove half a dozen or so to gather in Vienna this week! You're all mad! :) Barry _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user