Package: libgdal20
Severity: whishlist
Dear GDAL maintainers, libgdal20 is packaged in Debian 10 with the option
'--with-cfitsio=no' due to some license issues in CFITSIO (see [1]).
I have worked to an extension of the FITS driver in GDAL (see [2]), funded by a
European programme, aiming to improve interoperability between astronomical and
remote sensing formats. We hoped to make FITS easily readable by Open GIS
software using GDAL.
The license issue about CFITSIO has been solved in CFITSIO > 3.26 (see [3]):
from the changes.txt
"
- replaced all the source code in CFITSIO that was distributed under the
GNU General Public License with freely available code. In particular,
the gzip file compression and uncompression code was replaced by the
zlib compression library. Thus, beginning with this version 3.26 of
CFITSIO,
other software applications may freely use CFITSIO without necessarily
incurring any GNU licensing requirement. See the License.txt file for
the CFITSIO licensing requirements.
"
CFITSIO authors cannot see any restriction to link against CFITSIO which is
definitely a Public Domain released software.
If I understand correctly GNU/GPL files are still present in the source but not
used (see [4]).
As Debian/Ubuntu distributions are very popular, having GDAL not linked against
CFITSIO in them is a critical issue for interoperability.
I'm wondering if it could be possible to reconsider the packaging option of
GDAL.
Thanks for your attention.
Regards,
Chiara
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/422537
[2] https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/1298
[3] https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/FTP/software/fitsio/c/docs/changes.txt
[4]
https://salsa.debian.org/debian-astro-team/cfitsio/blob/master/debian/copyright
--
Chiara Marmo
Ingénieur de Recherche GEOPS - Paris Sud-11
Bât 509
Tel: +33 (0)1 69 15 49 03
