[GRASS5] nnbathy [was: Re: [bug #4248] (grass) r.surf.contour: Treats 0 as NULL and other archaic problems]

[Hamish]

Pavel wrote:
> 1. This software belongs to CSIRO, not me. The conditions of use in
> the README file are probably more loose than the ones you could
> possibly negotiate with CSIRO now (for historic reasons; the current
> policy is aimed at commercialization).

Understood, all too well. Same pressures here in NZ.. (for what it's
worth I'm an oceanographer in Dunedin).

> 2. These conditions were recognized as compatible with LGPL license by
> the plplot team; and the nn code is currently used in plplot package
> for gridding of scattered data.

Ok, sounds good. see below.
 
> 3. Frankly, I can not see why the ownership is such a big issue here.
> One can always make changes in a separate file if the ownership is
> important.

The main thing before using any code is that we can't violate anyone's
(GRASS's CSRIO's, etc) license agreements. I'm just being cautious, not
judging the goodness or badness of any license choice.

As far as I concern about such matters wrt GRASS, this means we should
be sure that anything we use is DFSG-compliant.
  http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
Mainly I figure they're smarter and have thought and dealt more about
these issues than I am/have. i.e. If the Debian-legal team is happy, I'm
happy.

A very good sign - it's already in Debian and already a library:

$ apt-cache show libcsiro0
Package: libcsiro0
Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 88
Maintainer: Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: plplot
Version: 5.3.1-4
Depends: libplplot9 (= 5.3.1-4), libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4), libqhull5
Conflicts: libplplot5, libplplot9 (<< 5.3.0.cvs.20040303)
Filename: pool/main/p/plplot/libcsiro0_5.3.1-4_i386.deb
Size: 25988
MD5sum: 0b82ead9a741d940339b0fa3570a2263
Description: Scientific plotting library
 This package contains two libraries developed by Pavel Sakov, from the
 CSIRO Marine Research, used in geometry applications:
 .
  * libcsirocsa: bivariate Cubic Spline Approximation library
  * libcsironn: Natural Neighbours interpolation library
 .
 The source code for these libraries are part of the plplot source
 package.
 .
 Homepage: http://www.plplot.org


This means we only need to link to the untouched libcsiro library (as we
do with GDAL), everybody is happy, end of story.  (I hope)
(just need someone to write the module ;)


> Hope this helps. If you are really serious about "GPL or dual-GPL
> license agreement with GRASS" and would like to negotiate with CSIRO,
> I can find a contact for you to deal with.

I believe your comment #2 showing that it is already cleanly packaged
obviates that need.


thanks for the feedback, as you can see it was quite useful.


Hamish