GRASS License Info

Venkatesh Raghavan raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
Tue Oct 12 22:20:17 EDT 1999


Hello GRASS users and developers,

Although my knowledge of the legal issues involved in making
GRASS available under the GPL licence is limited, I think it
an option that could be considered seriously. GPL licensing
of GRASS would attract more developers to be involved in
enhancing GRASS further. I also look forward to a time when
GRASS GIS (Perhaps GPL-GRASS?) would be included with
all major Linux distributions, just as the PostgreSQL or
MySql RDBMS packages are.

I also understand the legitimate concerns of the GRASS development
team and surely their immense contributions have to be duly
acknowledged. GRASS development at the present stage has
branched off to GRASS5.0. The development of GRASS4.2 is
now on a lower priority level as evidenced from the availability
of update packages from GRASS website in Europe and
USA. It may be worthwhile to consider the case of MySQL
where the MySQL_GPL 3.20.32a was made available under GPL and
the more recent MySQL is available under a different
licencing arrangement.

News about GPL release of MYSQL is available at
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/9312.html

Perhaps the GRASS community can consider making the GRASS4.2 available
under GPL and GRASS5.0 under a different licencing arrangement.
As for the GRASS5.0 licence the "MySQL FREE PUBLIC LICENSE'', which
is based on the "Aladdin FREE PUBLIC LICENSE.'' may be one option that
could be considered.

Details of the "MySQL FREE PUBLIC LICENSE'' are available at
http://www.mysql.org/Manual_chapter/manual_Public_license.html#Public_license

Thanks to all

Venkatesh Raghavan
Osaka City University





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