[geos-devel] Porting recent JTS contributions to GEOS

[Sandro Santilli]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 07:06:17PM -0400, Daniel Baston wrote:
> Some interesting new code has recently gone into JTS, for example a KNN
> search on STRtrees (https://github.com/locationtech/jts/pull/75).
> 
> JTS is now under the Eclipse license.  Can post-1.14 contributions still be
> ported to GEOS and released under LGPL?

This was a good question. It isn't clear to me whether ports are always
to be considered "Derivative Work" and I guess it would depend on country
and local laws.

I see three possible approaches to the problem:

 1. Make a clean room implementation (ie: don't look at JTS)
 2. Ask Vivid Solutions to allow distributing JTS as LGPL2+ too
 3. Assume a port is not affected (maybe asking LocationTech for legal advice)

I don't know why JTS copyright holders wanted to "eclipse" their license...

--strk;