[GRASSLIST:1288] Re: creating a desktop GIS application using GRASS

[Paul Kelly]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Radim Blazek wrote:

> On Tuesday 16 September 2003 15:34, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > because not all GRASS developers agree with Radim's mission
> > to promote the development of proprietary software on top of GRASS.
>
> It realy seems, that I am last to leave the GRASS boat, but it is not clear what
> other developers want. So I want to ask developers contributing to GRASS,
> if they could clearly say, if it is acceptable for them, to open GRASS for
> proprietary applications. That means to relicense some libraries,
> probably gis, vector and dbmi to LGPL or similar license.
> My question now is not about technical details, but about your attitude.
> I would welcome some clear answer like "yes" or "no".

If you want a short clear answer, then I would be generally positive to
this kind of thing ("yes") with lots of conditions. The mean reason would
be for e.g. v.in.dwg and some of the r.in.gdal formats where it is GRASS'
own licence preventing us from doing what we wanted, not that of the
external software.

I would not be particularly supportive of Bill's idea to develop a
proprietary data analysis module that would function alongside the
existing GPL modules. New analysis modules that rely on the GRASS core
libraries should be forced to be under the same licence so that everybody
who has contributed to the core libraries can benefit from the new
analysis capabilites that are built on other people's work.

But I just feel that data I/O should maybe be treated differently. The
whole vector library should not be re-licenced as in 5.7 it includes
interfaces to advanced analysis functionality, e.g. directed graph stuff
and all the 'cleaning and tidying' of non-topological data (wasn't it
recently merged into the Vlib?). So there would need to be a separate
clearly defined I/O library (for reading&writing to the GRASS database) if
this re-licencing was going to happen. But Glynn already said he would
re-write the raster i/o functions for 5.7 so there is some scope there.

I am not an expert and am open to persuasion. Just a few thoughts,
Paul