Frank, It looks mostly good to me.
A few remarks : 1) I had a strange feeling when I read that "In the absence of a user or application level policy, default to a policy of "PREFER_PROPRIETARY"". It sounds a bit paradoxical for an open source library... I guess that on Linux, it should be "PREFER_RECIPROCAL" and "PREFER_PROPRIETARY" on Windows. Just kidding... 2) We don't control the licence of third party libraries and their licencing terms can thus change over the time or have multiple licencing terms. a) For example, currently the GDAL EPSILON driver relies on the epsilon library which is currently GPL. But Alessandro Furieri (Spatialite/Rasterlite author ) asked to the author of libepsilon if he would agree to relicence it under LGPL because what makes librasterlite GPL is the epsilon dependency. ( http://groups.google.com/group/spatialite- users/browse_thread/thread/503faf18b78c3c6e/adbd5b7cef1cb5e8 ). This has been accepted but no newer release of libepsilon has been yet released. Admitedly licencing changes don't occur frequently so we can just indicate the ones of the latest released version of the third party library. (Note: this doesn't affect the GDAL rasterlite driver that is an independant implementation that doesn't use librasterlite) b) For MySQL, it depends on whether you use the open source version (GPL) or the commercial version. 3) Licences of the drivers : * In the list of reciprocal drivers, you can add PDF (because of poppler being GPL) * I'm not sure for the GPSBabel driver. The driver doesn't technically link to GPSBabel (GPL) but communicate it with it through fork / exec / pipe. Does it make the driver to be bound to the GPL ? * As far as ODBC, PGEO, MSSQLSPATIAL (and GEOMEDIA in trunk), it depends on the actual ODBC library... On unix, unixODBC is LGPL. * The OGR SOSI driver should probably be marked as proprietary currently as it relies on linking with binary objects with unknown licencing terms, even if apparently the ultimate goal seems to open source them. * I'm not sure for the ArcSDE Raster. I imagine this should be commercial ? * I'm a bit confused by http://gdal.org/frmt_msg.html. Seems that it relies on third party stuff with both proprietary and GPL code. 4) A technical detail, but Python bindings automatically register the drivers when importing gdal or ogr modules, so it would not be possible to do a gdal.SetConfigOption('GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY', 'USE_ALL'), but os.environ['GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY'] = 'USE_ALL' should work 5) I was wondering if it wouldn't be nice to have a *build* option that could be equivalent to setting GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY = USE_ALL. That would only be usefull for power users that build their own GDAL for their own purposes and don't intend distributing it. Obviously neither Linux distributions nor OSGeo4W should use it, so that makes its use case scarce. That's all for tonight ! Best regards, Even > Folks, > > I have been thinking about how to adjust OSGeo4W in particular, and GDAL > in general to make it easier to distribute software in a way that complies > with the conflict between GPLed software and proprietary software. > > In the case of OSGeo4W the main restrictions is that we should not be > distributing GRASS in such a way that proprietary drivers like the MrSID > driver can be used without the user having knowingly combined them by > themselves. > > To that end, I have prepared an RFC which attempts to address this at > the GDAL driver registration level. I'd appreciate feedback: > > http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc34_license_policy > > Best regards, _______________________________________________ gdal-dev mailing list gdal-dev@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
