[gdal-dev] New JPEG 2000 Driver

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

The GDAL driver code would need to be licensed the same as the rest of GDAL
(which I see from the PR is the case).

It is fine for the Grok library to be under the AGPL as long as it is an
optional dependency of GDAL.  Folks who are prepared to comply with it's
license can enable it at build time.

While I'm somewhat sad about further complexification of the GDAL JPEG2000
landscape, I do not see a fundamental reason not to add a Grok based
driver.   That said, it would require a GDAL committer interested in
addressing the PR.

Best regards,
Frank


On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 2:51 PM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

>
> 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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-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | +1 650-701-7823
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer
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