[gdal-dev] Licensing Policy for drivers and applications

[Even Rouault]

Frank,

It looks mostly good to me.

A few remarks :

1) I had a strange feeling when I read that "In the absence of a user or 
application level policy, default to a policy of "PREFER_PROPRIETARY"". It 
sounds a bit paradoxical for an open source library... I guess that on Linux, 
it should be "PREFER_RECIPROCAL" and "PREFER_PROPRIETARY" on Windows. Just 
kidding...

2) We don't control the licence of third party libraries and their licencing 
terms can thus change over the time or have multiple licencing terms.

a) For example, currently the GDAL EPSILON driver relies on the epsilon 
library which is currently GPL. But Alessandro Furieri (Spatialite/Rasterlite 
author ) asked to the author of libepsilon if he would agree to relicence it 
under LGPL because what makes librasterlite GPL is the epsilon dependency. ( 
http://groups.google.com/group/spatialite-
users/browse_thread/thread/503faf18b78c3c6e/adbd5b7cef1cb5e8 ). This has been 
accepted but no newer release of libepsilon has been yet released. Admitedly 
licencing changes don't occur frequently so we can just indicate the ones of 
the latest released version of the third party library.

(Note: this doesn't affect the GDAL rasterlite driver that is an independant 
implementation that doesn't use librasterlite)

b) For MySQL, it depends on whether you use the open source version (GPL) or 
the commercial version.

3) Licences of the drivers :

* In the list of reciprocal drivers, you can add PDF (because of poppler being 
GPL) 
* I'm not sure for the GPSBabel driver. The driver doesn't technically link to 
GPSBabel (GPL) but communicate it with it through fork / exec / pipe. Does it 
make the driver to be bound to the GPL ?
* As far as ODBC, PGEO, MSSQLSPATIAL (and GEOMEDIA in trunk), it depends on 
the actual ODBC library... On unix, unixODBC is LGPL.
* The OGR SOSI driver should probably be marked as proprietary currently as it 
relies on linking with binary objects with unknown licencing terms, even if 
apparently the ultimate goal seems to open source them.
* I'm not sure for the ArcSDE Raster. I imagine this should be commercial ?
* I'm a bit confused by http://gdal.org/frmt_msg.html. Seems that it relies on 
third party stuff with both proprietary and GPL code.

4) A technical detail, but Python bindings automatically register the drivers 
when importing gdal or ogr modules, so it would not be possible to do a 
gdal.SetConfigOption('GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY', 'USE_ALL'), but 
os.environ['GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY'] = 'USE_ALL' should work

5) I was wondering if it wouldn't be nice to have a *build* option that could 
be equivalent to setting GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY = USE_ALL. That would only be 
usefull for power users that build their own GDAL for their own purposes and 
don't intend distributing it. Obviously neither Linux distributions nor 
OSGeo4W should use it, so that makes its use case scarce.

That's all for tonight !

Best regards,

Even

> Folks,
> 
> I have been thinking about how to adjust OSGeo4W in particular, and GDAL
> in general to make it easier to distribute software in a way that complies
> with the conflict between GPLed software and proprietary software.
> 
> In the case of OSGeo4W the main restrictions is that we should not be
> distributing GRASS in such a way that proprietary drivers like the MrSID
> driver can be used without the user having knowingly combined them by
> themselves.
> 
> To that end, I have prepared an RFC which attempts to address this at
> the GDAL driver registration level.  I'd appreciate feedback:
> 
>    http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc34_license_policy
> 
> Best regards,