[gdal-dev] New JPEG 2000 Driver

[Greg Troxel]

Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> writes:

> Can you transparently tell us why Grok is AGPL licensed ? Do you sell 
> commercial licenses for people who couldn't comply with the AGPL license ? 

Certainly a good question.  I have no idea in this case and my comments
should not be taken to imply anything about this particular library

I am guessing that gdal would not contemplate a license change to GPL
lightly, and that many (most?) would be opposed to changing to AGPL.

My impression is that gdal is all MIT licensed, and that absen't giving
some configure arguments to link against proprietary libraries, one ends
up with a pure MIT licensed result.  If that's wrong, please let me konw
and I'll fix up pkgsrc's metadata.

Perhaps due to the use of AGPL in many cases as a club to sell
proprietary licenses, rather than as a tool to advaance software
freedom, or perhaps just due to concerns about network access, I think
there is a lot of concern about using AGPL software.  When the software
is fundamentally a web service, that's one thing (e.g. nextcloud), but
when it's a library that then forces large amounts of other software to
be offered under AGPL (and perhaps only, with the rlying sources as
derived works notion), it seems broadly uncomfortable and in large part
unacceptable.

My impression is that Debian does not have issues with AGPL3 as it it is
formally a Free Software license, even when being used to subvert
software freedom.  However, I personally view AGPL3 as not reasonable
when there is a proprietary-license-also model.  I do view it as
reasonable when there is no possibility to get a proprietary license AND
contributions are accepted back without any kind of mechanism that would
enable proprietary licenses (assignment or grants in a CLA).

In pkgsrc, which I realize is a minority packaging system, we have
excluded AGPL from the set of defautl licenses (equivalent to Debian
main) because of the notion that people would find obligations
triggereed by merely running software with network access to be
surprising.  So for us, a license change to AGPL would be a big deal.

So while I'd like to understand the licensing stance of Grok, as long as
it's AGPL instead of MIT, it seems entirely out of the question to me.
I should note that I do not have any -1/+1 tokens to throw around, but
that doesn't stop me from ranting :-)

Greg

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