[GRASS5] GRASS and LGPL

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 06:12:05PM -0400, Angus Carr wrote:
> > So, GRASS developers: What's your opinion here? Any problems to put the 
> > GRASS libs under LGPL?

> I am all for this license change, personally. It fits in better with the
> original relase concept of "public domain". As an occasional contributor, I am
> happy to see my code be used elsewhere. 

Even if it is improved and then closed up. :)

> Most of the improvements to GRASS will continue to be rolled back in by
> contributors, and will be made available to the GRASS community. 

Well histroy shows, that this was not the case, so the better protection 
of the GPL is necessary in my opinions.

> If there is a licensing issue associated with doing an Open Source (but not
> GPL-compatible) project, we should change our licensing conditions, if only to
> allow further usage of GRASS, which can only be good for us, the GRASS
> community.

It could snap back as it did in a couple of times.
(Commercial comanies taking code, GRASS for windows, gpz's improvements).
GRASS sufferent from a long track of people taking code and not
contributing back again.

However I believe that we should make the libraries which deal with 
interoperabilty available under LGPL. Frank want access to the GRASS
data file structures, we should seperate that part of the GRASS
libraries and release it under the GNU Lesser General Public License
(LGPL). 

And of course we all know that Frank Warmerdam's intentions are good and
he is a great contributor to free software.  Frank: Can you identify the
library (parts) of GRASS, you need for accessing grass files?  It should
be as small as possible. We should to get consensus to release this part
under LGPL.

	Bernhard
-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  
The FreeGIS Project				            (freegis.org)
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure            (ffii.org)
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