I'm sending this email on behalf of Adrian, who made an heroic effort in 
reviewing the licensing issues in the GeoTools code base.


*************************************************************************

Cameron,

The GeoTools community would like you to represent us to the Steering
Committee of the OSGeo Foundation to ask that committee to approve the
graduation of the GeoTools project from incubation to full membership.

As you well know, the project decided to assign the copyright of all its
contributors to the OSGeo foundation. As part of that work, we developed
a Copyright Assignment Agreement which should be easily alterable for
other OSGeo projects wishing to follow the same path and therefore could
serve as a contribution to the larger OSGeo community. All of the core
GeoTools contributors have signed the document and sent their copy to
the foundation. Tyler has gather the list here:
   http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Contributor_Agreements_Received
so you can see significant participation from our side. Jan is going to
resend his agreement which arrived sans signature.

Subsequent to that work, the GeoTools source code file headers were all
converted to formally document the copyright of OSGeo on all the code
files. The files in the formal, shared SVN have all been changed. While
the vast majority of the code is copyright OSGeo only, a few classes
retain a joint copyright with other individuals or entities which
contributed to the creation of that code. There is a plan afoot to
release our first 2.5 Milestone next week with these new headers to show
our intent to continue with that copyright.

We have also undergone a multi-step review of the copyright and
licensing status of the entire code base. Unfortunately, this has been
exceedingly complicated and the community participation has been mixed
so the documentation of our current status has not been completely
homogeneous. Below, I lay out the status of things as they now stand and
how you can find the details for each code module.

It is our hope that this work is sufficient to satisfy everyone that
OSGeo now holds the copyright to the GeoTools code base, that everyone
has the full and complete right to distribute and re-distribute all of
our code and files under the LGPL, version 2.1. There are a number of
minor issues still being resolved---these have all been documented. If
we cannot resolve them in a timely fashion, we will remove the code or
files.

It may be that GeoTools, as it now stands, is too heterogeneous to be
acceptable to OSGeo. If it appears likely that the steering committee,
in its deliberations, is likely to refuse GeoTools graduation, perhaps
you could offer an alternative solution. We would like to graduate as a
single coherent block but, if forced to do so, we could offer to
graduate as a new project, tentatively named GeoTools3, transplanting
our code piece by piece as each component reaches the level of quality
required by OSGeo. The base modules or the library are ready today, and
other modules would be ported as they reach the same level of quality.
Our plan would be to move that project to be hosted by OSGeo servers,
perhaps with mirrors elsewhere.

Thanks for your time as our mentor and, in advance, for the work you
will do reviewing our work and presenting this request to the Steering
Committee next week,

   The GeoTools Community


***************************************************************************

     GeoTools Copyright and Licensing Status, July 4th, 2008
     -------------------------------------------------------

GeoTools is a collaborative computer programming project started in the
late 1990's and active since then. The current goal of the project is to
develop a computer code library useful to the broadest community for the
treatment of geospatial data. The strategy to achieve that goal is to
code a library in the Java computer language which follows the
conventions of the language, the standards of the OGC and ISO, and the
norms of the computer community.

GeoTools source code is the copyright of the OSGeo Foundation and a few
others. The source and binaries are licensed under the terms of the LGPL
version 2.1 and a few other licenses, such as BSD license, for certain
classes.

The details are below.


Cameron,

As I understand it, you plan to go over the codebase this weekend and
take a look at where things stand. Below we work through the directory
tree you would get if you did:
   svn co http://svn.geotools.org/trunk/
which is how we distribute the raw source code.

The core of our review work is held in files called review.apt which are
found in the src/site/apt dir of most modules.
   ( You may want to use: find . -name "review\.apt" )
These files contain the most detailed description of where things stand
in the code base.

Master Task:
     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1873

The big picture:
---------------
The top level directory has
build/       Files and code for building, cleaning, managing the source
demo/        Demonstration code, in the public domain.
licenses/    The text of the various licenses and prototype headers
modules/     The core of the code
spike/       A temporary experimental zone, this code is not part of
              formal releases.

Build:
-----
build/dummy      placeholder so we can compile on Java5 without a formal
                  dependency on JAXB.
build/eclipse    formatting files for the IDE
build/fixtures   property files for online tests.
build/maven/*    Code files and xml for maven to build and assemble
                  GeoTools for distribution.
scm/cleanup      Files to cleanup an svndump

These files are not distributed beyond the scm. The dummy JAXB files
merely follow the interfaces of the JAXB standard and contain no logic.
The files are needed only at compile time and are not distributed. They
will be removed when we move to Java6

Demo:
----
demo/coverage-use
demo/example
demo/introduction    A stand-alone GUI app to show how to get started.
demo/libraryJTS      Code showing first steps in how to use JTS
demo/mappane-use     Example of how to use Ian's JMapPane
demo/referencing     Example of how to use referencing
demo/svgsupport
demo/xml-po

The copyright of these files is all of OSGeo with a license placing the
code in the public domain. These files therefore have a different
header. Three of these projects have review.apt files with details.

Licenses:
--------
The dir holds the LICENSE and GeoTools.html files describing the license
of the whole library plus the text of the various licences we use (EPSG,
LGPL, and the headers we use in project code.


Spike:
-----
These are experimental directories which we hope to move elsewhere in
the near term. They are not distributed outside of the svn.

All java files are clean and copyright OSGeo. The zzorn directory
contains some data of unknown origin for which we have committed a JIRA
task: TODO.


Modules:
--------

library/api       code CLEAN, some assumptions
                   resources NONE
library/coverage  code CLEAN except for
                     org/geotools/image/palette/CustomPaletteBuilder.java
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1874
                   resources NONE
library/CQL       code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
library/data      code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
library/jdbc      code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
library/legacy    code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
library/main      code CLEAN with assumptions, one file with extra (C)
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1881
                   resources Lots in test/ needs review
                     JIRA TODO
library/metadata  code CLEAN with one confirmation of MassGIS (C)
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1875
                   resources NONE
lib/referencing   code CLEAN
                   resources CLEAN
library/render    code CLEAN, presume U. Leeds gives us (C)
                   resources DIRTY, need cleanup
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1876
lib/sample-data   code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY, need cleanup
                     JIRA TODO
library/xml       code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY, example xml and xsd files
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1877

**********************************************************************

plugin/arcgrid    code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
plugin/arcsde     code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY, need review
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1878
plugin/db2        code DIRTY, issue with IBM license
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1879
                   resources DIRTY, origin and license unknown
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1880
plug/epsg-access  code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
plug/epst-extn    code CLEAN
                   resources include two problematic properties files
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1882
plug/epsg-hsql    code CLEAN
                   resources CLEAN, including copy of EPSG.sql database.
plug/epsg-psql    code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
plug/epsg-wkt     code CLEAN
                   resources, we include a problematic properties file
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1883
plugin/geotiff    code CLEAN, with public domain contributions
                   resources CLEAN, with public domain contributions
plugin/gtopo30    code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY, need origin of W002N52.zip
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1884
plugin/image      Code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1886
plug/imagemosaic  Code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1885
plug/imagepyramid Code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1887

plugin/postgis    Code CLEAN
                   resources ONLY some connection files for testing
plugin/property   Code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
plg/referencing3D Code CLEAN
                   resources CLEAN
plg/shapefile     code CLEAN, with two joint (C) to resolve
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1888
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1889
plg/wfs           code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1890
plugin/wms        code CLEAN
                   resources DIRTY
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1891

*************************************************************************

extension/brewer  code CLEAN
                   resources CLEAN, with apache style license resources
extension/graph   code CLEAN, with two confounded (C)
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1892
                   resources, NONE
extn/openoffice   code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
extn/shp-rnd      code CLEAN
                   resources, need vetting
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1893
extn/validation   Code CLEAN
                   resources need vetting
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1894
extn/widgt-swing  Code Clean
                   resources NONE
extn/xsd          UNKNOWN

**************************************************************************

...

unsup/covio       Code Clean
                   resources NONE
unsup/covio-netcdf  Code clean
                   resources NONE
unsup/go          Code clean
                   resources NONE
unsup/geometry    Code clean
                   resources, need to confim the test-data come from JTS
                     http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-1895
unsup/temporal    code CLEAN
                   resources NONE
unsup/wdgswgpnd   code CLEAN
                   resources from several sources LGPL

...

There are others in this module but I am out of steam. They are also
significantly more messy than the modules above.

--adrian

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsored by: SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards: VOTE NOW!
Studies have shown that voting for your favorite open source project,
along with a healthy diet, reduces your potential for chronic lameness
and boredom. Vote Now at http://www.sourceforge.net/community/cca08
_______________________________________________
Geotools-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-devel

Reply via email to