[OSGeo-Discuss] legal aspects of QGIS plugins

[Jody Garnett]

I had to look into this recently Thomas:

When stack exchange first setup shop they made all the answers "creative
commons" (which is great, allows the answers to be quoted nicely). However
that does not quite work out for runnable code (since CC is a doc license
not a software license). :) Software is a pen, not a poem. :)

Recently they changed so all the code examples are clearly MIT with
attribute required.

What does that mean? Get this .. depending on when the answer was uploaded
to stack exchange you can use it or not.

My best advice is:
- stick to examples after March 1st 2016
- for examples prior to March 1st 2016 make your own code (inspired by the
technique on stack exchange)

(In both cases be kind to the next developer and use a comment to link back
to the stack exchange inspiration)

Reference:
-
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/272956/a-new-code-license-the-mit-this-time-with-attribution-required


--
Jody Garnett

On 6 March 2017 at 12:26, 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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>
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