[Gdal-dev] GDAL and the ECW SDK - licence and build issues.

[Roger James]

I am moving my windows application which is uses GDAL (1.4.2) from an
MSVC7.1 to an MSVC8.1 (Visual Studio Express) build environment. I have been
recompiling most of my support libraries including GDAL using VC8.1 to avoid
c runtime version conflicts. This has given me a problem when trying to
rebuild GDAL with ECW support.  I was using a binary version of the ECW_SDK
(3.3) which I downloaded some time ago. This contains the old form of the
ECW EULA (the one that refers to there being three versions of the licence),
this covered the use I wanted to make of it.

 

I tried to link to the static library version of ECW and override the crt
versions it was requesting (a fairly standard thing to do), however I cannot
get this to work. Whatever linker commands I try I seem to end up with
conflicts and unresolved symbols. I then tried to link the ECW library as a
DLL and live with the possibility of run time conflicts; however I still ran
in to issues with symbol conflicts and unresolved symbols.

 

My next step was to rebuild the ECW library from source. This meant I had to
download the latest version from ERMapper (now Leica). Unfortunately this
comes with a new a version of the EULA which forbids any commercial use and
directs you to contact ERMapper to negotiate a licence. This is not
practical for us at this time.

 

Looking at the original licence text it seems to me that it allows source
code redistribution. So my first question is can anyone supply me with or
point me at a copy of the ECW_SDK 3.3 source code with the original licence.

 

My next question is. Has anyone succeeded in making a Visual Studio Express
(VC8.1) version of GDAL using the ECW_SDK in binary or source form under the
old licence terms in a way that is legal.

 

I am also interested in any comments on what this new licensing stance means
for the future of ECW support in GDAL. I can see there has been debate in
the past on ECW licensing on the list, but the situation appears to have
changed.

 

For information I am only interested in using the sdk for decompression.

 

Roger

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/attachments/20070915/31871b50/attachment.html