[OSGeo-Discuss] legal aspects of QGIS plugins

[Werner Macho]

Hi Thomas,

IMHO this is ja an applied usage of known spatial functions and algorithms.
So my opinion is that there is no violation of "intelectual property".
I mean if it would be possible to patent those "common" things nothing
would be allowed and even other commercial GIS products could not
implement it.
And the main question is - who did it first? ;).
As far as I see ESRI is only (very well) documenting common practise,
but that does not necessarily mean that they invented it or do have
any property on it.

Thats my 2c (with thanks to ESRI for the documentation)

Looking forward to your (also well documented? ;) ) plugin

kind regards
Werner


On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 9:26 PM, Thomas Baumann <baumann.th at gmx.de> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have a question concerning the legal aspects of QGIS plugins:
>
> Some time ago there was a question on gis.stackexchange about how to
> generate equal sized polygons along a line:
>
> https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/173127/generating-equal-sized-polygons-along-line-with-pyqgis
>
> As I needed the functionality,too I wrote a QGIS plugin for myself
> which uses the logic provided in the answers.
>
> Now i would like to give others the opportunity to use this plugin,too, but
> don't know if ESRI has some sort of Intellectual Property for a tool like
> this.
>
> There is the ESRI tool "Creating strip map index features"
>
> http://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/map/page-layouts/creating-strip-map-index-features.htm
>
> I guess in general there are a lot of tools that are available in ESRI
> products as well as in other OpenSource GIS solutions like gvSIG, OpenJump
> or QGIS
> (buffer, dissolve and so on).
>
> I just want to make sure that it's ok to publish a QGIS plugin like mine.
>
> So my question is: Can you tell me if a QGIS plugin which creates polygons
> along a line
> (as the ESRI strip map index feature tool does) would violate ESRI's
> intelletual properties?
>
> best wishes,
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
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