[gdal-dev] Licensing Policy for drivers and applications

[Howard Butler]

On 11-01-29 03:44 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> 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

I'm asymptotically approaching -1 on this RFC.  My concern is that it misplaces the apparent responsibility for managing licensing constraints on *us*.  It should always be the responsibility of users of the software to know, care, and mange the licensing of the software they're using.  What happens if we mislabel a driver?  Or not realize that a driver links to A, which links to B, which is GPL?  It's still the user's responsibility, but we've just done them a disservice.

> 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.


Another reason I don't like this is that it puts us square in the middle of the GPL vs commercial software war which I don't think we have been so interested in fighting.  IMO, we shouldn't try to protect users from having to care about this stuff, because they clearly need to understand the ground rules if they're going to choose to make a porridge of GPL and proprietary software.  

There's nothing preventing a user from manually registering only the drivers they need at runtime now.  If they need to register only non-GPL drivers, or non-proprietary ones, they can do so.  I completely agree this doesn't solve OSGeo4W's problem.

I do not formally object to this RFC with a veto, and I expect that it will be implemented, but I wanted to voice my opinion that I think this is a slippery, slippery slope.

Howard