[gdal-dev] New JPEG 2000 Driver

[Aaron Boxer]

Hi Brad,

Definitely makes for an interesting discussion.

A few questions to ponder:

Is it GDAL's mandate to encourage projects with permissive licenses and to,
shall we say,
discourage those with copy-left licenses ? This is how Google and Apple
operate,
but they are for-profit corporations who clearly have a vested interest in
permissive open source.
GDAL is a non-profit, open source project. Also, most GDAL users are not
GDAL developers,
and many of these users have no strong feelings about licensing as long as
they can get their work done.
If driver A is faster and more feature rich than driver B, they will want
driver A.

Is it legitimate to take OpenJPEG, close the source, improve the code and
add features,
and then sell the result without contributing these improvements back to
OpenJPEG?
Indeed, it is legitimate, permitted, and encouraged by the BSD license. And
many have
done so. Likewise with relicensing under a different FLOSS license, as long
as BSD terms are
respected.

If GDAL supports proprietary drivers but rejects open source drivers
because they are copy-left,
this doesn't seem consistent to me. Perhaps all proprietary drivers should
be removed, if
that is the desire of the project? Keeping JP2KAK and rejecting JP2Grok
seems a bit hard
to fathom to me.

As for proliferation of driver code, the Jasper driver seems to be on the
way out, as Jasper
code is dangerously insecure and filled with bugs. So, JP2Grok would simply
take its place.

My two cents.

Aaron


On Sun, Feb 28, 2021 at 8:15 PM Brad Hards <bradh at frogmouth.net> wrote:

> I think this will be an interesting issue for the GDAL PMC.
>
> On one hand, AGPL is no worse than some proprietary (optional) dependency
> libraries. On the other hand, supporting it in GDAL is
> implicitly endorsing the fork, and adds to the proliferation of driver
> code in the GDAL/OGR repository. I think this could
> reasonably be decided either way.
>
> Brad
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gdal-dev mailing list
> gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/gdal-dev
>
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