[Gdal-dev] Standard LICENSE / credit requirement reporting

[Howard Butler]

+1 on what is proposed.  No need for an RFC, but maybe we should  
update the developer RFC to tip people off on what is expected with  
respect to these kinds of issues.  Thanks for doing this work.

Howard

On Sep 11, 2007, at 8:40 PM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:

> 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
>
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