[gdal-dev] Driver maintenance - long-term solution ?

[Greg Troxel]

David Strip <gdal at stripfamily.net> writes:

>       License monkey business isn't viable in any way with
>         GDAL. It would just create confusion and erode trust, which we
>         can't get back if broken. 

Strongly agreed.

>     gdal wouldn't be the first project to change it's license, though I
>     really don't know enough about the consequences others have faced
>     for doing so.  Even the revered GPL is a moving target.
>     If the alternative is a burned out lead developer/maintainer and a
>     dead project, that's not a desirable outcome either. 

My impression is that every project that has tried to play games with
open source licenses has basically been a one-company project, and that
this has led to shunning.

>     I'm not sure I agree that changing the license would create
>     confusion and erode trust. Assuming that we (whoever "we" are)
>     actually have the legal right to change the license, let's play a
>     hypothetical.

The only projects that can arbitrarily change license are those in which

  The copyright is held my one company or a small number of people.
  This is why projects that pretend to be open source and ask for
  assignment of rights to a company are problematic.

  There are a small number of contributors who would agree.

  Projects that are e.g BSD licensed that want to move to GPL.  The old
  code remains, but the new code has a copyleft.

>     The new license maintains fees from two classes of users:
>     1. Anyone incorporating gdal into a product that is 
>          a. not completely open source,  and
>         b. charges a license fee (perpetual or subscription), and
>         c. has more than x active licenses (x = 500? 1000?)
>     2. Any for-profit organization utilizing gdal in-house for data
>     analysis, conversion, on-line services,  etc, in excess of x CPU
>     hours per year (where y = 1000? 5000?...)
>     3. Any organization that uses gdal indirectly through a free, open
>     source product (eg, QGIS) or a licensed product covered under 1)
>     above is exempt from 1) and 2). 

That's obviously no longer open source.

>     I don't think I need to name names - you know who the big players
>     are in categories 1 and 2. Only two in category 1 and none in
>     category 2 stepped up with a large (relative to the ask) commitment
>     in the previous barn raising. 

I think you should name names.  It's not helpful to pretend we shouldn't.

>      Equally, the vast majority of users will have no question that they
>     continue to operate in the free range. Given that this whole thing
>     started with a suggestion that the only way to make users aware of
>     deprecation of obsolete drivers was to make the drivers stop
>     working, how many users will even be aware of a license change?

This will cause binary gdal packages, and everything that depends on
them, to get kicked out of first-class status or dropped from many
packaging systems.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/attachments/20210113/a443e9a5/attachment.sig>