[GRASS5] GNU Free Documentation License and maps

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 03:11:40PM -0400, Greg Sepesi wrote:
> It seems that the GNU FDL (Free Documentation License, see
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#FDL) is applicable to maps as
> well as manuals.  Has there been any discussion of GRASS inserting an
> FDL notice in the maps it creates?

there was recently some discussion on how to license Free GeoData
on the FreeGIS Mailing List (see the archives,
http://intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/2003-August/thread.html).
There was also discussion about this
at the Libre Software Meeting in Metz about 2 month ago.

In essence, there is some upcoming need for a specific license for
geo-data. Meanwhile the GPL seems appropriate, maybe with some
future option such as the license I choose for Frida
(see
http://www.intevation.de/cgi-bin/viewcvs-freegis.cgi/free-vector-geodata-osnabrueck/COPYING?rev=1.2&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
and
http://frida.intevation.org)

I think the FDL is less suitable though it is not absolutely
inapropriate as an intermediate solution.

> With SVG maps (which I've been creating for testing code), map users
> have the opportunity to edit/copy map data with a text editor.  Some
> commercial map vendors avoid SVG because of this.

You mean *proprietary* vendors? GRASS is a commercial tool as well! :-)

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

Intevation GmbH	              	     http://intevation.de/
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