[gdal-dev] Licensing Policy for drivers and applications

[Ray Gardener]

Oh man. So over time, as more GPL'd drivers are written, the very 
purpose of GDAL gets watered down. It's not like people are going to 
develop MIT-licenced drivers if they see an existing GPL driver that 
does the job. At the very least, the motivation will be blunted.

The whole reason I went with GDAL was that it was reasonable in regards 
to commercial devs. Now there's going to be a situation where they get 
increasingly treated as second-class citizens.

It's unreasonable to disclose a large application just because drivers 
are GPL'd. It should be submission policy to GDAL that they're LGPL'd. 
Frank's gone to the trouble of creating an environment that is 
commercial agnostic, and now it's being undone.

Ray




On 1/31/2011 10:49 PM, strk wrote:

> You can include the drivers, and your application can be commercial.
> Only, you have to give your customers the rights to get your
> application's source code, to modify it and to redistribute it.
>
> If you don't want to do that, ask the GPL driver copyright holders
> if they agree on you putting the code they allowed you to use,
> look at, modify and distribute into something they can NOT look at,
> modify or distribute.
>
> Sounds kind of unfair to me, but they may have a different opinion
> (or business plan) on the matter.