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

[Jody Garnett]

Martin the geotools project which you approached earlier has not had a
chance to look into your request yet with any degree of care. As an
example we had not gotten around to checking the code contribution
agreement yet.

The community process takes time, I was unable to attend the meeting (
due to a conflict with incubation meeting ) and apparently my input
was requested as I had a hand in the incubation process.

Part of working with others involves making allowances for their time;
especially when herding volunteers.

Two points of clarity:
- LocationTech was only motioned in passing as you had approached the
IRC channel, and perhaps as uDig is chasing after its long standing
goal of being more involved with eclipse. If you need to refer to my
actions please reference me by name; I am up front with my goals and
have no agenda.
- there has been no vote or decision on how to proceed by the geotools
community. Justin attempted to summarize discussion but is as of yet
still checking facts.

Try and relax and work constructively with others. If you want you can
help me write the RFC to assemble the information for PMC review.
Currently i am spending more of my volunteer time writing email with
you then helping you at the moment.

One thing that is getting lost in this is that you should have many
options for finding a community.
--
Jody Garnett

On 20/07/2012, at 7:03 PM, Martin Desruisseaux
<martin.desruisseaux at geomatys.fr> wrote:

> Hello all
>
> This is my first post on this mailing list. I'm Martin Desruisseaux, a former GeoTools 2 contributor and now a developer of the Geotoolkit.org project.
>
> In our search for a community, we had a recent discussion with members of the Apache Spatial Information System project (http://incubator.apache.org/sis/), which is in incubation. A small email exchange gave me the feeling that our design goals could be in phase.
>
> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-sis-dev/201207.mbox/browser (see the "Exploring possible contribution" thread)
>
> We would like to offer them the Geotoolkit.org code. In order to make that possible, we need OSGeo permission to re-license Geotoolkit.org from its current LGPL 2.1 license to the more permissive Apache license. The proposal is not to transfer the totality of Geotoolkit.org to Apache SIS, but to allow them to review the code and pick-up whatever they wish on a case-by-case basis. The transition to Apache SIS would probably be slow and very progressive.
>
> Geotoolkit.org is a fork of GeoTools 2.6 followed by 4 years of developments. The project contains two parts: "core" and "pending". Our proposal is to begin with the "core" part, which was written (according SVN history) at 95% by myself, Geomatys or IRD institute. The remaining 5% were written by other GeoTools contributors. To my knowledge, everyone signed the copyright assignment on http://download.osgeo.org/osgeo/legal/, which gives copyright to OSGeo.
>
> We would like OSGeo permission to re-license that code. I would like to emphases that this is not a demand for relicensing current GeoTools, but only relicensing of the GeoTools 2.6 code from which Geotoolkit.org is derived, which is 4 years old. If OSGeo accepts to grant us permission to relicense 100% of Geotoolkit.org "core", that would be truly appreciated. But in case of objection, we are willing to rewrite the 5% of "core" code which was not written by myself, Geomatys or IRD.
>
> If OSGeo accepts re-licensing, it would allows Apache SIS to gain services they are currently missing, allows Geotoolkit.org code base to gain a community, and possibly allows the GeoTools project to gain a trusted and maintained metadata and referencing libraries which could replace their current modules, if they wish.
>
> Would it be possible to take this action?
>
>    Regards,
>
>        Martin Desruisseaux
>
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