[GRASS5] New info on openDWG

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 09:41:01PM -0700, Michael Barton wrote:
> Beyond Michael Tiemann's helpful suggestion about looking at the Cygwin and
> MySQL models, do you have any recommendations I could pass on to them as to
> how they might change their license to be more Free Software friendly, while
> still keeping the option (which I assume they want) to charge a fee to
> people who want to sell commercial software using their libraries?
> (Apparently the latter include ESRI and some fairly big CAD firms, though
> not AutoDesk)

I think, the concepts, Micheal Tiemann described are the only
ones that the Alliance might accept as a first approach.
This way, some of the advantages of Free Software can not
be gained, but the primary goal of them, to allow proprietary
integration via licenses, would be met very nicely. And in fact,
this model seems to be perfectly in line with their current
aims and policy.

I'd suggest to apply the GNU GPL license for the software.
This way, only Free Software products under GNU GPL itself
could use the library. If they would choose GNU LGPL, proprietary
products could link the library without the special licensing.


However, you should not forget that Free Software is also
commcercial software on demand:
http://www.intevation.de/%7Ejan/infos/dont_oppose_commercial_and_free_software.en.html

Best

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

Intevation GmbH                      http://intevation.de/
FreeGIS                                http://freegis.org/