[pgrouting-dev] Re: Network Layering support

[Daniel Kastl]

Hi Jay and Steve,

This email is getting very long, so I will shorten it a bit.



>>        * http://routingdemo.geofabrik.de/
>>        * http://sourceforge.net/projects/routed/
>>
>>    It uses contraction hierarchies algorithm.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks for the links. Are you certain that the above project uses
>> contraction hierarchies algorithm by Robert Geisberger? I went thru the
>> source, and they are using contraction, but I did not see where they
>> have used the node ordering step as proposed in the CH paper. I did not
>> find contraction hierarchies mentioned in their readme too:
>> http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/routed/wiki/ReadMe
>>
>
> It is possible that they read the paper and made their own implementation
> to avoid the AGPL license. The paper is describes the algorithms in great
> detail, so I'm sure this is possible.
>
>
The notice I read through Twitter:
http://twitter.com/#!/geofabrik/status/38579590834159616
According to this is uses CH. And the license is AGPL as well.




>      If we are using the code already made available thru AGPL (I dont
>> understand the intricacies of different licences) by Robert
>>
>
> I think we need to read and understand the AGPL license and how it might
> impact on the current license. These are tricky issues and it might prohibit
> us from including their code directly.
>
> If we wanted to do that we could still use the AGPL code to build test
> model that would allow us to validate the our code was getting reasonable
> results.


As far as I understand AGPL is more strict than GPL in terms of services
delivered with this software. So if you offer a routing service with this
software, you need to also give access to the source code to the users of
this service (GPL licensed software only cares about the software you pass
to someone).
This is probably something that not every pgRouting user would be happy
with.

Daniel


-- 
Georepublic UG & Georepublic Japan
eMail: daniel.kastl at georepublic.de
Web: http://georepublic.de
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