Crowdfunding Initiative: QGIS-GeoServer Styling Interoperability

Dear Reader,

as we promised a few months ago we are proposing in this post a comprehensive approach that will allow to reach full interoperability between QGIS and GeoServer when it comes to styling data in QGIS itself and then export to GeoServer.

As we described in this post we have invested some of our own time in order to get a better understanding of the QGIS platform (and of our speed of execution while working on it) as well as to estimate the total effort in reaching full interoperability as mentioned above. Such work is already part of both official GeoServer and QGIS repositories.

We are now launching a fundraising campaign seeking contributions to cover the remaining work items. The full list of tasks to perform, with brief explanations, is provided in the spreadsheet linked here together with the funding required according to our internal estimates. The rate we have used for computing the prices is already heavily discounted from our standard prices and we are willing to take the risk on the estimates we are providing.

If you are asking yourself why you should participate this offer and how this is different from previous efforts, we can tell you the following things:

  • Our goal is not to make external plugins but to provide code contributions to both projects to be able to exchange valid SLD correctly at their core. Other plugins will be able to leverage this.
  • We will take on us the duty to make sure this work will be mantained in the future, through bug fixes and more
  • Our history of contributions to Open Source is pretty solid as we have contributed actively to many Open Source products like GeoServerGeoNetwork, GeoNode, GeoTools, CKAN, QGIS and many others.

We will start perfoming tasks in the order they are presented in the spreadsheet above (top down), one work item at a time, as soon as we reach the needed funding; everytime a threshold is reached we will send invoices to the participants and requests the promised funding.

OpenGeoGroup has kindly provided funding, hence we would like to thank publicly, for the “Text symbolizer export” functionality (row 16 in the tasksheet above) hence that work is already in motion and should be completed in early 2017.

So, if you are willing to share this effort, complete the contribution form here below and we will get in touch. No contribution is too small!

Findarasing Form

Last but not least, in the unlikely event that we fail on some contributions, the respective funding will be given back immediately.

The GeoSolutions team,