[Gdal-dev] Standard LICENSE / credit requirement reporting

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

Also in the Provenance review effort, some licenses include clauses like:

"""
*       Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer
in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the
distribution.
"""

which is sometimes referred to as a "credit requirement".  Even the GDAL
license contains the text:

"""
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
"""

which has been read by some lawyers to imply the need to include the license
text in binary distributions of the software package.

In order to simplify reporting requirements for applications using GDAL and
for gdal utilities themselves, I propose to:

  - add a LICENSE.TXT in the gdal source directly listing all licenses
    and credit notices.
  - install this file GDAL data files (/usr/local/share/gdal for instance)
  - extend GDALVersionInfo("LICENSE") to report this file to stdout.
  - add --license commandline switch to gdal and ogr standard commandline
    processing to report this file.

In the future when we add code directly to GDAL with credit requirements
(or possibly when we depend on it as an optional library) we would add the
appropriate text in the gdal/LICENSE.TXT file.

Any thoughts on the appropriateness of this?  Do we need an RFC for this?
It seems somewhat like overkill to me.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org