[PROJ] OSGeo incubation status

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 9/10/19 1:16 PM, Martin Desruisseaux wrote:
> On EPSG, can we really said that the data fail under MIT license because
> we do not modify it? The EPSG terms of use said:
> 
>> You are obliged to inform anyone to whom you provide the EPSG
>> Facilities of these Terms of Use.
> So we need to inform users that they can not modify those data without
> changing the EPSG name. And also that they can not extract the data and
> sell them alone (without the added value of PROJ or other software).
> Those conditions are not MIT terms.

Unless PROJ already modifies the data and doesn't attribute it to the
EPSG dataset. There is no epsg init file any more, there is proj.db now.

Not being a lawyer I cannot provide an authoritative answer, only my
interpretation.

> The Apache Software Foundation legal team has debated about the
> permission to include EPSG data in Apache software [3], and our
> conclusion was that we can not provide them directly. We do that
> indirectly by providing the data in a "non-free" package and require an
> explicit action from users (which we try to make as simple as possible)
> to get them.

I hope we can prevent this situation with proj, as we'll revert back to
the one with libgeotiff-epsg which few users installed despite needing it.

In the worst case scenario proj moves to non-free and everything that
depends on it to contrib, making them not part of Debian and loose QA
coverage, autobuilding and the like. This would be very harmful to users.

I would stick to the working theory until IOGP complains and proves us
otherwise.

Kind Regards,

Bas

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