Julian, all, This is a powerful example of the value of ASF activities.
Its great to see the coordination of Apache and Proj4J teams. George Percivall [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > On Dec 5, 2022, at 6:15 PM, Julian Hyde <[email protected]> wrote: > > I wanted to share a story of successful open source collaboration. > > In the review of Baremaps dependencies [0], Martin Desruisseaux > pointed out that Baremaps depended on the Proj4J library [1], and that > it had some licensing issues. Specifically, Proj4J is licensed under > the Apache license, but it includes the EPSG data set [2] in the jar > file, and that data set has some terms of use. The user has to agree > to those terms of use, and that's tricky to achieve in a server or > library project. So there is doubt whether it can genuinely be > distributed under the Apache license. > > In Calcite, we had recently added Proj4J as a dependency, and we > included it in our 1.32 release. We had exposed our users to legal > jeopardy, and needed to fix the problem urgently. > > Bertil Chapuis took the initiative to remove Proj4J from Calcite [3] > (or more precisely, make it an optional dependency). Meanwhile I > logged an issue so that the Proj4J team was aware [4]. > > The Proj4J team fixed the issue by splitting the EPSG data set out of > the Proj4J library, so that Proj4J is now compliant with the Apache > license, and releasing version 1.2.0. Bertil will shortly reinstate > Proj4J as a Calcite dependency, upgrading to the new version. > > I want to thank everyone involved: Martin, Bertil and Jim Hughes from > Apache, and everyone from the Proj4J team but especially Grigory > Pomadchin. Sorting out licensing issues is not exciting work but it is > crucial to maintain users' trust. Before this issue was solved, we > were considering removing functionality or using other libraries. With > this issue behind us, we can deliver the best possible geospatial > functionality to our users. > > Julian > > [0] https://lists.apache.org/thread/2g6j1jx7q5l1sx4mfp1w29obgnvrnvq5 > [1] https://github.com/locationtech/proj4j > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSG_Geodetic_Parameter_Dataset > [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CALCITE-5399 > [4] https://github.com/locationtech/proj4j/issues/90 > [5] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CALCITE-5417
