Hi all,
my company recently had an open-source licensing audit, and our lawyer
uttered some concerns about the vecmath library, which is a dependency of
GeoTools. The discussion is still in progress, but I'd thought I'd share
this so that the community could learn (or help clear up) any issues...
Currently, Geotools uses vecmath 1.3.2 as one of its dependencies. The most
recent version 1.5.2 has been considered in GEOT-2660
<http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-2660>, and was found to be working,
but was never used. The central maven repository only contains 1.3.1.
Version 1.3.2 and 1.5.2 can be found on the osgeo maven repository, they
have probably been uploaded by members of this community.
Vecmath 1.3.2 (and 1.5.1) is part of the Java3D
<https://java3d.java.net/> package,
which is available under the Sun Binary Code License
<http://download.java.net/media/java3d/builds/release/1.3.2/BINARY-CODE-LICENSE.txt>.
GEOT-22 <http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GEOT-22> mentions vecmath is
available under the Java Distribution License, but the link is broken, and
the current page of that project <https://java.net/projects/vecmath> does
not list any usable information or a download.
Since no "official" download is available, I'm assuming vecmath is part of
the Java3D suite. The license for Java3D demands that the Java3D files are
distributed as a whole, it is therefor not allowed to distribute only
vecmath. Strangely enough, inside the vecmath jar, another license is
bundled: the Java Research license (for non commercial use) or the Java
Distribution License (for commercial use)... Note that the Java3D project
page mentions the source for vecmath is GPL with CPE, but I'm not sure how
this affects the jars...
Our lawyer mentioned that both the BCL and JDL are outdated Sun licenses
for which Oracle isn't quite clear on how to handle it. He says the best
solution would be to avoid them. Does anyone know some more detailed
information about the licensing terms of vecmath?
While looking around, I came across something interesting. Apparently, some
new life has blown into the Java3D project, as you can find in this blog
post
<https://gouessej.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/java-3d-est-de-retour-java-3d-is-back>
and the corresponding github <https://github.com/hharrison/java3d-core>. It
may be worth checking out. (It uses a GPL with CPE license.)
Regards,
Dieter
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