[Gdal-dev] Standard LICENSE / credit requirement reporting

[Even Rouault]

+1.

GDALVersionInfo("LICENSE") is a good idea !

On Wednesday 12 September 2007 03:40:34 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,