[GRASS5] v.in.dwg license problem

H Bowman hamish_nospam at yahoo.com
Sat May 17 06:21:07 EDT 2003


> I do not understand what the big difficulty would be to put
> modules such as v.in.dwg in a special modules / special page (such as
> http://grass.itc.it/grass_addons.html).


Just to clarify, and to throw in another 2c (bringing me up to $0.04
that I owe everybody)

As mentioned, we have 
http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass/src.nonGPL/
and
http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass/src.contrib/

why not have 
http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass51/src.nonGPL/
or
http://freegis.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/grass51/src.contrib/

as well?

The difference between the two is src.contrib gets included in the
source distribution, but not necessarily built, and src.nonGPL never
gets included in the source distribution. Everything stays somewhere in
CVS at intevation.de, it is more a matter of what eventually gets tagged
as release branch and what never does. Both modules in src.contrib and
src.nonGPL should have prominent web pages declaring their existence
(especially src.nonGPL) otherwise how would anyone find out they exist?

My guess would be v.in.dwg falls under the contrib category, as
v.in.dwg.c itself is GPL-like, it just can't be built by default.
(But I'm not a license expert and it isn't my decision)

I'd think the source distro really needs to be absolutely 100% clean
license wise, especially if we want it included in Debian or Mandrake.
Note that Debian also distributes all packages as auto-buildable source,
for however that complicates things, or doesn't.

If it is confusing why a module lives where it does in the source tree,
use a README file explaining the situation. Actually I'd think anything
in those directories should have a big README explaining why.



Life's a compromise, do the best you can.
Hamish




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