[Geoprisma-dev] Licensing was: MapFish-trunk in external

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Yves Moisan wrote:
>> === license ===
>> Steve is right about the license.  
> 
> Not really.  The Modified BSD licence we are using is compatible with
> the GPL MapFish is using :
> http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

OK, Daniel, please look into this issue.

I am be wrong, but I think your are not interpreting this correctly.

What the above says is that these licenses do not contradict the GPL 
licenses.

So if you mix GPL code and BSD code you get ............. GPL code.
That works great for them but not for the people that want BSD licenses.

GPL licenses are like a virus, any thing you mix with it becomes GPL.
There are some licenses that you can NOT mix with GPL because they 
require actions the are GPL incompatible.

If I build an GeoPrisma application for a client and he mixes it with 
his code, he does not what all his code becoming GPL and then has to 
release his proprietary code as GPL. So GeoPrisma needs to be GPL clean!

You should not bring anything that is GPL into GeoPrisma which is under 
a BSD license or it will make GeoPrisma into a GPL license.

One of the OpenSource selection criteria that my clients put on me is NO 
GPL code.

That means if someone has a cool GPL thingy that you would like to have 
in GeoPrisma then you need to recreate the functionality in clean code 
that does not use the GPL'd code.

This unfortunately means that you can not use mapfish code.

There is one possible angle to this that might let you get by that is it 
might be possible to convince people that the client JS code can be GPL 
as long as the service code is BSD. But it muddies the water and makes 
it harder to convince people to use the product. And you run the risk of 
something innocently polluting you server side code with something that 
is GPL and came along with some client-side piece. I am not a lawyer.

If you need help or another opinion Frank W. is probably someone that 
understands this pretty well.

My 2 cents,
   -Steve


>> === size of GeoPrisma ===
>> But still, I think we should remove all the things we don't currently 
>> need.  The current trunk version of GeoPrisma is 772mb.  That's a lot.  
>> What's not needed should be removed.
>>
>> Before MapFish changed their repository structure, we used to have only 
>> Mapfish-client portion included.  As soon as they changed their repos, 
>> we included everything but it was due to this change ratter than a need 
>> of the new features included.
> 
>> I'm in favor of removing the MapFish portion we don't need : all, but 
>> client-side.
> 
> I'll see what we can do with excluding directories in externals.
> 
> Yves
> 
>> Alexandre
>>
>>
>> Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>>> Another thing to consider is product licensing. Unless I am mistaken, 
>>> MF is licensed under one of the GPL licenses which is not compatible 
>>> with the GP license and you should probably not mix these two together 
>>> or it will change your license to GPL one.
>>>
>>> See the COPYING COPYING.LESSER files:
>>> http://www.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/browser/framework/client/trunk
>>>
>>> -Steve
>>
>