Thanks to Martin Dobias' work on the GRASS raster problem, we now have a 0.8.1 test version that includes the raster fix, as well as all the other changes in the upcoming 0.8.1 release.

Please feel free to download and test this version. The setup file is available here: http://download.qgis.org/qgis/win32/qgis_setup0.8.1-rc1.exe (52Mb)

How about presenting at FOSS4G2007 this September? I will be presenting a half-day workshop on QGIS and it would be great to have some follow-on presentations later in the week.

The board on Friday approved a motion for QGIS to enter incubation into OSGeo. This starts the incubation process to bring QGIS into full OSGeo membership. OSGeo is currently incubating a number of projects and QGIS joins GRASS and OSSIM in the Desktop Applications category.

The Quantum GIS project today submitted the request to join the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The next step is approval by the OSGeo Incubation Committee, which will kick off the incubation process.

Polling of the QGIS community has indicated broad support for joining OSGeo and we look forward to becoming an active and supportive member of the Foundation.

I sent an email to the QGIS mailing lists regarding QGIS joining the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). To make sure everybody gets a chance to comment, the email is duplicated below. Feel free to comment.

Now that 0.8 is released, its time to consider OSGeo membership for
QGIS. Some of you may recall we ran a poll a while back about this issue.

The results were:
  Yes  	   	 81.4%  	
  Maybe 	 11.5% 	
  No  	  	  7.2% 	

Congratulations to Marco Gualdrini of Italy for being the 1,000th person to register as a QGIS user.

We have a sneaking suspicion that 1,000 users represents a fraction of the people out there that are using QGIS.

If you haven't registered and added your location to the user map, you can do so at http://qgis.org/qgis_users/index.php.

Binaries for most supported platforms, including Debian Etch, SuSE 10.2,
Ubuntu Edgy, OS X, and Windows are available at http://download.qgis.org. The
source code is also available, as is a Gentoo ebuild. In the coming days we also hope to have a binary bundle that will run on any Linux platform.

The QGIS development team released version 0.8 ('Titan') on December 29th. At present this is primarily a source release for those that want to build QGIS. Packages for most Linux distributions, Windows, and Mac OS X are being assembled and should be available in the next few days.

In addition to the source, we currently have available packages for Debian Testing (Etch) and SuSE 10.2.

All packages and source are available at http://download.qgis.org.

Today the MapServer export tool builds (and works) under Windows. I have uploaded a new QGIS setup for Windows to
http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/testbuilds/qgis_setup.exe.

With this build, all plugins and parts of QGIS should be functional (though untested) under Windows. This includes the new context help system (accessed by the Help button on enabled dialogs). Feel free to download the setup and give it a spin.

Note: The MapServer export tool requires Python 2.5.

After a long development period, QGIS 0.8 will be released on December 29th.

The 0.8 release represents major architectural changes to the code, including
the port from Qt 3.x to Qt 4.2.2. If you haven't been following the progress,
the major new features include:

• WMS support
• Improved vector and attribute editing
• Improved measure tools with area measuring
• Attribute searching
• New legend structure
• Refactoring of API to allow the use of QGIS libraries in mapping applications