Dylan Beaudette wrote:
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
I also don't think this was intentionally done and, as confirmed by
Frank, GDAL peoples will look into this.
But, even if derived from public domain work, I would suggest to Perry
to give the right credit to peoples that works on this:
its only a matter of fair play.
Btw: I cannot imagine how much of the GRASS code could have been ripped
in other apps and licences...
Maxi
--
Dr. Eng. Massimiliano Cannata
Responsabile Area Geomatica
Istituto Scienze della Terra
Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana
Via Trevano, c.p. 72
CH-6952 Canobbio-Lugano
Tel: +41 (0)58 666 62 14
Fax +41 (0)58 666 62 09
_______________________________________________
grass-psc mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-psc
