[GRASS5] Your sourcecode in GRASS, license problem

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hello Ernst,

some of your source code is part of the GRASS GIS project.
I am with the development team of the new version 5 of GRASS.
	http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/index2.html

Since last year the GRASS development has accelerated, when 
the long lasting licensing issues were resolved.
GRASS has been released as Free Software under the GNU GPL license.
(Some people like the term "Open Source" software.)

As the GRASS codebase is huge we still have to resolve some problem with
license of certain code parts.




It seems that you have written most source code which now resides in the
directory grass/src/libes/geom/
You can browse it in the development CVS on the web at:
	http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass/src/libes/geom/


Obviously you wrote all code in basic, lia and sos.
The optri directory is missing an indication of authorship. 
Are you the author?

basic seems to be free software, according to its readme and therefore
can happily reside in GRASS.

lia and sos seem to have contradicting licensing statements:

     	The code for the Lia Library is copyrighted by the original author
	& the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.  However, the
	author chose to put it in the Public Domain, and permission to use,
	copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for
	educational, research, and non-profit purposes is hereby granted,
	provided that this notice,

If you have placed the source code in the public domain that would
render it free software and allow all uses.
This would include that distributors like RedHat could offer service
around it the software, like creating GNU/Linux distributions.

If the restriction to educational, research, and non-profit purposes
holds, it is not free software and not compatible with the GNU GPL.
This would mean we had to remove it from GRASS.


optri seems to be more difficult, as it seems to be no free software at
all. Do you see a possibility to get it released as free software?



I also noticed that the same license problems exist within your
current detri package, which can be downloaded from:
	http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/cglist/GeomDir/

Please advise in how we can make your code useful for everybody to use.
I will be happy to answer your questions about the licensing issues.

Thanks in advance,
	Bernhard

ps.: This mail is also send to the open developers mailinglist
	http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/grassdevel.html.
You are invited to send a carbon copy of your answer to it, if you like.

-- 
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The FreeGIS Project				            (freegis.org)
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