[GRASS5] Re: OSGeo Incubation IRC chat: in 30 minutes from now

[Hamish]

> > > I assume that the second point will help with regard to the
> > > possibility of relicensing of GRASS to MIT/X11 as discussed
> > > earlier.
> >
> > What about GPL dependencies used in grass (e.g.FFTW) ?

The concern, I believe, was that by giving OSGeo control of the
copyright to the GRASS source code, others outside the GRASS project
could (if they decided to, which is doubtful) relicense GRASS as
something other than GPL. AFAICT this would be against the wishes of the
majority of the developers. Of course any code incorporating non-GRASS
GPL code would have to be removed if GRASS ever went non-GPL.

> Since FFTW is not "integrated" in the grass code, I think there is no
> licencing problems.

If a program is linked against a GPL library (such as FFTW), the program
must be licensed as GPL as well. In this case the module must be GPL but
libgis et al. could be LGPL. (although I'm not advocating that)



Hamish