On 11-01-29 06:16 PM, Even Rouault wrote:
1) I had a strange feeling when I read that "In the absence of a user or
application level policy, default to a policy of "PREFER_PROPRIETARY"". It
sounds a bit paradoxical for an open source library... I guess that on Linux,
it should be "PREFER_RECIPROCAL" and "PREFER_PROPRIETARY" on Windows. Just
kidding...
Even,
Indeed, I felt the same way. But I mostly think about formats like
ecw and mrsid being of high interest and I hadn't realized there were
as many reciprocally licensed drivers.
2) We don't control the licence of third party libraries and their licencing
terms can thus change over the time or have multiple licencing terms.
a) For example, currently the GDAL EPSILON driver relies on the epsilon
library which is currently GPL. But Alessandro Furieri (Spatialite/Rasterlite
author ) asked to the author of libepsilon if he would agree to relicence it
I believe we would just make a reasonable effort. In some cases
we might be able to detect from the version of the library what
policy applies.
b) For MySQL, it depends on whether you use the open source version (GPL) or
the commercial version.
Really? I had assumed that the client libraries would have been
under a non-reciprocal license even if the database server itself
was GPLed. I wonder if there is a way of determining the license
configuration at runtime or from the include files.
3) Licences of the drivers :
* In the list of reciprocal drivers, you can add PDF (because of poppler being
GPL)
* I'm not sure for the GPSBabel driver. The driver doesn't technically link to
GPSBabel (GPL) but communicate it with it through fork / exec / pipe. Does it
make the driver to be bound to the GPL ?
As long as the GPLed code is in a different process it seems clear
that the GPL license requirements do not apply. So this one should
be fine as "nonreciprocal".
* As far as ODBC, PGEO, MSSQLSPATIAL (and GEOMEDIA in trunk), it depends on
the actual ODBC library... On unix, unixODBC is LGPL.
That could be hard to establish. I'm still unclear on what we will
do here.
* The OGR SOSI driver should probably be marked as proprietary currently as it
relies on linking with binary objects with unknown licencing terms, even if
apparently the ultimate goal seems to open source them.
Noted in the RFC.
* I'm not sure for the ArcSDE Raster. I imagine this should be commercial ?
agreed
* I'm a bit confused by http://gdal.org/frmt_msg.html. Seems that it relies on
third party stuff with both proprietary and GPL code.
I have listed this in the rfc.
4) A technical detail, but Python bindings automatically register the drivers
when importing gdal or ogr modules, so it would not be possible to do a
gdal.SetConfigOption('GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY', 'USE_ALL'), but
os.environ['GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY'] = 'USE_ALL' should work
Agreed, I have added a note about exposing AutoSkipDrivers() via SWIG
so an application that wants to apply a particular policy can update
the loaded drivers.
5) I was wondering if it wouldn't be nice to have a *build* option that could
be equivalent to setting GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY = USE_ALL. That would only be
usefull for power users that build their own GDAL for their own purposes and
don't intend distributing it. Obviously neither Linux distributions nor
OSGeo4W should use it, so that makes its use case scarce.
Yes, this seems like it could be useful. Presumably we would implement
this in a way that lets the software be built with any particular default
GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY if not provided by other means. I have incorporated
it in the RFC.
Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [email protected]
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent
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