[Board] Asking permission for re-licensing from LGPL to Apache

[Cameron Shorter]

Martin, (talking as a non-board member),

I'd be interested to hear who voted from the Geotools PSC, and their 
reasons for voting as they did.
Are you able to point at the IRC logs, or email conversation? 
Alternatively invite the people with concerns to air their opinions.

I think this question is likely to become much bigger than just a 
geotools relicense, as with the recent interest of Eclipse's location 
arm, LocationTech, there will be other projects facing a similar decision.

On 27/07/2012 8:10 AM, Martin Desruisseaux wrote:
> Board
>
> As suggested, we posted our request on the GeoTools mailing list 
> (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=29572383). The 
> GeoTools PMC had a meeting Monday, which resulted in 2 "inclined yes" 
> votes, 2 "inclined no" votes and one proposal to re-license GeoTools 
> too. We do not know yet the final GeoTools PMC decision, neither we 
> saw any reply to our request from the OSGeo board. Consequently I 
> would like to recall a few points, and make one proposal (note: my 
> willing is not to create contentious, but to insist on open source 
> spirit in a context where two projects are facing strategic steps):
>
>  1. We granted copyright to OSGeo, not to GeoTools.
>  2. When we granted copyright, we understood that OSGeo would have the
>     duty to behave according its charter, which is not to protect the
>     economical interests of some members or to favour one particular
>     project at the expense of an other project.
>  3. We were willing to trim every code not written by ourselves (while
>     of course we prefer not having to - see proposal below).
>  4. GeoTools contains thousands of lines of code written by ourselves
>     - when we left, we were the authors of 40% of GeoTools 2.6 code base.
>  5. If OSGeo requires GeoTools permission for re-licensing our code,
>     then conversely we assume that GeoTools needs our agreement for
>     re-licensing our above-cited work.
>
>
> Considering that some peoples considered to re-license GeoTools as 
> part of their plan to join LocationTech (Eclipse), we would like to 
> reach an agreement around the following proposal: OSGeo allows 
> re-licensing of the full Geotoolkit.org code base to Apache 2, 
> including the work derived from other contributors in GeoTools 2.6 (as 
> of 2008, it was 5% of lines of code in the "core" modules and an 
> undetermined percentage in the "pending" modules - we can compute this 
> number if it is considered necessary for reaching an agreement). In 
> return, we give our agreement for re-licensing any work we committed 
> on the GeoTools SVN (both OSGeo and SourceForge), at any time in the 
> history under any license that the GeoTools PMC wishes. From an 
> "amount of lines of code" point of view, I don't think that GeoTools 
> would be deserved by such deal.
>
>     Martin
>
>
>
> Le 20/07/12 23:37, Cameron Shorter a écrit :
>> Martin, board,
>> (talking as a non-board member)
>>
>> I recommend that the course of action should be:
>>
>> 1. Note that OSGeo's commitment is to support projects, and support 
>> Open Source use for projects.
>> 2. Note that there are 2 projects with a vested interest in this 
>> decision, GeoTools and Geotoolkit.
>> 3. Note that the board would in principle be in a position to support 
>> Geotoolkit's request, as it is a request to use an Open Source 
>> licence (which part of OSGeo's charter)
>> 4. However, before making a decision, the board, and/or Martin, 
>> should approach the GeoTools community, and ask for comment, in 
>> particular ask the GeoTools community if there are any grounds for 
>> objection which might revolve around how GeoTools might be adversely 
>> effected by such a license change.
>
>
>
>
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> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com

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