[Gdal-dev] Standard LICENSE / credit requirement reporting

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I have implemented and committed the changes.  GDAL should
now install LICENSE.TXT in /usr/local/share/gdal and it should
report it from the utilities if you give the --license switch
as well as from GDALVersionInfo().

I have also taken the liberty of modifying RFC 3 (commiter guidelines)
with this note in the legal section:

* Code with licenses requiring credit, or disclosure to users should be added 
to /trunk/gdal/LICENSE.TXT.

While the practice of updating adopted RFCs is somewhat questionable,
I hope we can consider this a minor editorial change without having
a round of voting, etc.  If there are any concerns let me know.

Best regards,

Even Rouault wrote:
> +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,
> 
> 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org