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

[Seven (aka Arnulf)]

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,

(I don't think that GPL is dying, it is still 70% on SourceForge last
time I checked)

The more interesting question is - what are the "natural causes"? To me
it seems that Open Source is just not being so much under pressure from
a FUD POV, it is wide and largely accepted making it much less prone to
being appropriated. Therefore maybe the whole concept of Copyleft is
just not that important any more?

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

-- 
Exploring Space, Time and Mind
http://arnulf.us