On 11/19/2013 2:42 PM, Pierre Racine wrote:
IMHO, It's fine (actually wonderful) that postgis is in the GPL, it
protects the project and does not really limit its use in any
substantive way. It's big enough to stand on its own. But re: #2
GPL would limit the wide use of these scripts.
How would GPL limit the wide use of these scripts? I find it's ok
that any derivative be licensed the same way. It doesn't force a
using software to be completely under GPL, just the derivative
scripts of those scripts. It seems to me that the fact that PL/pgSQL
is open by nature makes it very easy to redistribute these files or
any derivative with the same license without limiting the rest of the
software to be under any other kind of license. Does that make
sense?
I'm not a lawyer, but this is my simplistic understanding of these
license issue.
1. If it is GPL and I add it to my code them my code has to be licensed
undr GPL. This is problematic for most business. If I have a proprietary
product that I'm spent 100's of thousands of hours to develop and
believe that it is critical to my success, there is no way that I can
afford to allow GPL code into it. This is not a judgement call on the
correctness of this thinking. And the GPL advocates will have similar
arguments from their point of view.
2. If it licensed BSD or CC-0, it can be used by everyone without
restrictions and can be incorporated into GPL works without a problem.
It simply provides wider and unrestricted use or the product.
The more complicated issue is related to what is the dividing line
between GPL code and Not GPL code and at what point does your the Not
GPL code become GPL because you crossed that line. But that is an issue
for the lawyers and does not really impact your decision on how to
license your code.
Its your code, pick the one you want.
-Steve
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