[gdal-dev] Licensing Policy for drivers and applications

[Frank Warmerdam]

On 11-01-29 06:16 PM, Even Rouault wrote:
> 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...

Even,

Indeed, I felt the same way.  But I mostly think about formats like
ecw and mrsid being of high interest and I hadn't realized there were
as many reciprocally licensed drivers.

> 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

I believe we would just make a reasonable effort.  In some cases
we might be able to detect from the version of the library what
policy applies.

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

Really?  I had assumed that the client libraries would have been
under a non-reciprocal license even if the database server itself
was GPLed.  I wonder if there is a way of determining the license
configuration at runtime or from the include files.

> 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 long as the GPLed code is in a different process it seems clear
that the GPL license requirements do not apply.  So this one should
be fine as "nonreciprocal".

> * As far as ODBC, PGEO, MSSQLSPATIAL (and GEOMEDIA in trunk), it depends on
> the actual ODBC library... On unix, unixODBC is LGPL.

That could be hard to establish.  I'm still unclear on what we will
do here.

> * 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.

Noted in the RFC.

> * I'm not sure for the ArcSDE Raster. I imagine this should be commercial ?

agreed

> * 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.

I have listed this in the rfc.

> 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

Agreed, I have added a note about exposing AutoSkipDrivers() via SWIG
so an application that wants to apply a particular policy can update
the loaded drivers.

> 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.

Yes, this seems like it could be useful.  Presumably we would implement
this in a way that lets the software be built with any particular default
GDAL_LICENSE_POLICY if not provided by other means.    I have incorporated
it in the RFC.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent