[GRASS5] Re: grass5 digest, Vol 1 #2143 - 10 msgs

ASU Exchange michael.barton at asu.edu
Wed Mar 15 12:39:44 EST 2006


The issue here is not helping a non-GPL project. It is helping GRASS  
and enhancing open source software.

The place where I've run into problems most recently is working to  
develop an interface to make agent based modeling tools available to  
GRASS and GIS (in GRASS) available to open source agent based  
modeling platforms. A major system, with which we are working is  
released under BSD. A very useful interface we'd like to use is  
(SWIG) released under MIT. Because of the work the ABM folks do and  
clients they have, they feel that they cannot make their software  
GPL--although it is open-source licensed. They feel strongly about  
being open source and about being ethical with regards to licenses-- 
both commendable things. The licensing incompatibility is making it  
difficult to find a way to make GRASS and Java ABM platforms interact  
in a useful way. Not impossible, I hope, but it has added a  
significant layer of complication and considerably restricted the  
ways in which we can develop this interaction.

I'm not saying that we should make GRASS non-GPL, but hoping that we  
can find productive avenues to work with other open-source platforms  
that are not GPL (expanding the user, developer, and support base as  
well as making GRASS better).

Michael

On Mar 14, 2006, at 10:27 AM, grass5-request at grass.itc.it wrote:

>
>
>
> Markus Neteler wrote:
>
>> It was an example for existing problems. I have spoken quite a few  
>> times to
>> people who were interested to connect to GRASS, to invest even  
>> money into
>> further GRASS development, but then went away since this didn't  
>> want to
>> or could not (because they were not owner) publish their piece of  
>> software
>> under GPL.
>
> If they can't release the combined work under the GPL, that means that
> some other code which they wish to use is neither GPL/LGPL nor
> BSD/MIT, but under some licence which requires different restrictions
> on redistribution (e.g. non-commercial use only).
>
> Personally, I don't see any reason to assist such projects.
>
> -- 
> Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/attachments/20060315/457800a8/attachment.html


More information about the grass-dev mailing list