[OSGeo-Discuss] The importance of a project's license

[Andrew Ross]

On 07/27/2012 10:27 AM, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote:
> On 07/27/2012 11:45 AM, Mateusz Loskot wrote:
>> On 27 July 2012 05:55, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
>>> This is a really interesting debate. Reading the links provided it also
>>> appears to be a mixed bag about acceptance of LGPL of various firms and
>>> I'm also sure many of us can name firms that have no issue shipping LGPL
>>> components.
>> GPL is dying, of natural causes.
>>
>> http://ostatic.com/blog/the-top-licenses-on-github
>>
>> Best regards,
>
> Another interesting effect is the growing interest of other
> organizations in geospatial software, currently mainly on the library
> side of things. Current example is GeoTools and GeoToolKit and Eclipse
> and Apache respectively. It seems that this is a natural result of the
> commoditization of geospatial functions and features and their
> dissemination into standard IT. In coming years we will see less and
> less distinguishable and openly competing geospatial projects but more
> and more geospatial tools become a regular part of software
> distributions. We have already seen this happen in a way with GDAL/OGR
> which is being used all over the place. Just like Oracle has a WMS
> viewer built in installing PostgreSQL already has PostGIS - and may
> eventually also ship with MapServer and FeatureServer (or whatever makes
> the race) and there is no more need for a separate installation /
> configuration. Not sure where this leads us and this is just off the top
> of my head, but might be interesting to have a conversation about anyway.
>
> Cheers,
> Arnulf
>

Arnulf,

I think you may be right about geospatial software moving into main 
stream IT. Frankly when you see big software companies like Microsoft, 
IBM, Apple, Oracle, and others in the space then it's a good hint the 
shift is well under way.

The other powerful trend is pragmatic embracing of open source on the 
part of companies. When companies like Microsoft, ESRI, and others - 
long known for strong proprietary views - are working hard to embrace 
open source then it's clear something significant is taking place.

As companies want a closer relationship with open source projects and 
vice versa, LocationTech <http://wiki.eclipse.org/LocationTech> is a 
strong option given Eclipse's governance + history & the people involved.

Related, for those that haven't caught it already, see this article:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/07/open-source-won.html

Andrew


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