On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Hamish <[email protected]> wrote: > > [http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/2975] > > Frank wrote: >> If the GPL/GRASS derived portions cannot be rewritten we will have to >> remove them or the whole utility. > > It is pretty clear that the core methods of gdaldem were directly derived > from a GPL work. As luck would have it (I'm guessing, but it's highly > likely) that the GPL work in question was itself derived from a public domain > work, so there is a good chance that we have a fairly clean way out > of this. It is my hope that we will be able to find old CERL/GRASS public > domain versions to go back to which contain the bulk of the code so we can > confirm that and gdaldem doesn't have to be removed or relicensed as GPL. > But nobody has gone back to do that yet. An audit would have to be done > between that original CERL code, the modern GRASS code, and gdaldem to be > sure that no GPL additions are included. As gdaldem (seems) based on GPL > grass that means following each CVS/SVN log 1999-2006, which luckily we > still have. Confirming that some bits of it were in the public domain does > not confirm that other bits of it are not. > > If anything was found we'd have to sort that out, either by permission or > by rewrite. We'd have to supervise that to some extent, but the onus is > really on the new coder to prove that they have committed clean code. > > >> I appreciate your bringing this to our attention (indirectly). > > my intention had been to discuss it amongst ourselves here and more fully > do our homework on it so to present something robust to gdal from the > offset, rather to immediately yell "gpl violation!" and run in circles > waving arms about, which helps nobody. so the gdal bug is filed a little > sooner than I planned, but I guess that's not a bad thing either as I > would not like to see GDAL 1.7.0 published in the mean time without this > being known. > > I'd still like a discussion to take place among the GRASS devels as > I think it's healthy and reassuring to put forward a consensus view. > > > best, > Hamish >
I am not an expert on the myriad of open source licenses, however, I have met and interacted with Matt Perry and I do not think that this act was intentional. I think that bringing Matt into the discussion as soon as possible would be a good idea, as his original release of this code appeared to be done as a case study in GDAL programming. That said, I am glad that Hamish has spent the time and effort to look over this code. The movement of GPL-ed GRASS algorithms into BSD-ed mini-applications could represent a net loss of GRAS dev. time and effort. Thanks to all that have been looking into this matter. Cheers, Dylan _______________________________________________ grass-psc mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-psc
