Hello,
In the documentation in the GeoTools wiki the license for GeoTools is described as LGPL ( http://www.geotools.org/display/GEOT/1.4+Source+License ).
However, on the sourceforge project page the licenses GPL, LGPL, and MIT are listed ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/geotools/ ).
In the sources (for version 2.1.0), there seems to be both LGPL and GPL licensed code (based on license comments in files), as well as one source file covered by the Sun license (NumberParser.java, copied from an old version of the JDK perhaps?). The Sun license comment reads:
* Copyright 2002 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.
* SUN PROPRIETARY/CONFIDENTIAL. Use is subject to license terms.
Could the Wiki page mentioning only LGPL be updated to reflect the licenses mentioned on the sourceforge page? (Or alternatively the code updated to only contain LGPL licensed code, althought that is probably a more long term effort). Also, the Sun licensed file should probably be replaced or at least investigated, as it seems to be incompatible with GPL and LGPL.
We wanted to use the main-2.1.0.jar and shapefile-2.1.0.jar with the LGPL license. Fortunately, these two Jars did only contain one unit test file and one html file that were GPL licensed, and the Sun licensed NumberParser.java (used for parsing some doubles from strings). We removed the test, html file, and NumberParser.java. We had to replace the places where NumberParser.java was used (in DbaseFileReader.java) with (slower) calls to standard JDK library methods.
According to LGPL we make our changes to the code available in the attached file (it was the only changed source file).
<<DbaseFileReader.java>>
Best regards,
-- Hans Häggström
DbaseFileReader.java
Description: DbaseFileReader.java
