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

[Daniel Morissette]

Since you asked for my opinion in a previous email, here it is:

I am not a specialist of the GPL, but I believe Steve's analysis is 
right: publishing a BSD product which includes some GPL components 
imposes the GPL restrictions on all the BSD code and prevents the 
production of closed-source derivatives. This is not a problem for 
GeoPrisma/MapFish directly, but may be a problem for users of 
GeoPrisma/MapFish who do not want to be required to publish the source 
code of their applications. What is fuzzy to me in the Web world is how 
far the GPL reaches in its propagation. In the traditional desktop app 
mode, the rule seems more clear: my understanding is that if you link 
directly with a GPL component then all the code that links with it 
becomes bound to the GPL rules and must be published. In the web world 
it is not clear what linking means and how far GPL reaches in the 
components that it touches.

It also seems to me that people are bending the rules and tend to ignore 
the GPL nature of ExtJS when they use it with MapFish and GeoExt... so I 
am really looking forward to the outcome of this discussion in those 
communities.


Yves Moisan wrote:
> 
> My fingers did a bad key combination and the message got sent before I
> explained what the * was.  It was meant to be a P.S. mentioning that the
> two largest desktop FOSS4G products, namely GvSIG and QGIS, are both
> released under the GPL.  It's funny how the FOSS4G desktop world is GPL
> and the FOSS4G web isn't.
> 

My short answer is that Desktop apps are finished products, so people 
are unlikely to want to embed them in larger closed-source products and 
GPL is less of an issue in this case.

OTOH, GPL doesn't work for libraries or small Web components since it is 
not possible to build a closed-source product using a GPL component. 
That's why LGPL was created.

Here is a practical example: If GDAL/OGR was GPL instead of BSD, then it 
would not have the level of adoption that it has today. Very few, if 
any, of the organizations/businesses listed in 
http://gdal.org/credits.html would have used and contributed to it. 
(Note: I am not only referring to the list of sponsors at the top, there 
is a list of 20+ organizations who are credited for contributions at the 
bottom of the page)

I'll let you draw your own conclusions, but I am of the opinion that 
more often than not, GPL is a blocker to the adoption of Open Source 
software in the industry in general (outside of our open source circle).

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/