[GRASS5] v.in.dwg license problem

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 03:19:25PM +0200, Moritz Lennert wrote:

> Secondly, just to be sure that I understand correctly: noone in the GRASS
> team can forbid anyone to use a module such as v.in.dwg in the context of
> their work, i.e. in order to treat data that comes from clients using
> non-free formats, or ? 

Yes.
We might be in a remote legal danger if we encourage people to
break the license of GRASS. Thus a warning might shift 
that responsibility to the "builder".

> So, the question is not whether someone can use the
> module, but what status this module will have in the distribution of
> GRASS. 

Yes.
An additional debate it what strategy to apply in that
people in the Free Software world (e.g. using Debian on all the
platforms) also want to have dxf functionality and a dependency
on proprietory software is a drawback.

> Should it be part of the main distribution, which in the long run
> would probably imply a change of license status of the whole GRASS
> project, or should it be distributed seperately (either directly from the
> GRASS website, or via some other source) ? To take the example of the
> Debian distribution, it is the choice between keeping seperate trees such
> as "main" and "non-free", or merging everything together.
> 
> Do I understand the debate correctly ?

Yes, I think so.

For me one point in not distributing such a module in the core
of GRASS is publicity and the surprise value of the core CVS contents.
If we keep it in the core part of the CVS version,
we might warn people in the top pages that there are modules
with other licenses they have to check each module for themselfs.
There is no problem to distribute such a module in a non-free 
or contrib CVS module, like Debian does.
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