EPSG "Use of the data" Requirements

[Frank Warmerdam]

Bernard,

I am writing on behalf of several open source projects currently using
coordinate system lists derived from the EPSG database.  I have copied the
following from the README .doc file distributed with a somewhat recent
version of the database:

   1) All data pertinent to a specific coordinate reference system must be 
copied without modification and all related pages/records must be included;
   2) All components of this data set pertinent to any given coordinate 
reference system must be distributed together (complete distribution of all 
components of the data set is preferred, but the OGP  recognises the need for 
a more limited distribution);

My concern is that these projects mostly just distributed lists of
coordinate systems derived from the EPSG files, but expressed in another
format such as OGC Well Known Text, or PROJ.4 initialization strings.  The
problem with this is that such representations clearly violate items (1) and
(2).  That is, they don't include all data about the coordinate system, nor
do they include all related records.  For instance, fields like "remarks"
cannot be represented in WKT.  And related records such as from the area
of use table are generally not included.

So, I would like to petition the OGP Surveying and Positioning committee
to relax items (1) and (2) to not being requirements, but rather requests.

I would add that even the requirement that information be copied without
modification is hard to adhere to, when some representations do not support
the form the data is presented in the EPSG databse.  For instance, the
OGC WKT format only supports specifying ellipsoids as semi-major length and
inverse flattening.  Thus, ellipsoids specified in the EPSG dataset as
semi-major and semi-minor will be distributed in a modified form, in violation
of (1).

I realize that the OGP has little interest in bringing legal action over
such minor technical violations of the use terms, but as part of the
formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation there is an ongoing
effort to bring our projects (GDAL and Geotool in this case) into *strict*
compliance with the licensing terms of all components.  I hope that you
will also see value in modifing your terms so that they can be adhered
to in a variety of usage scenarios.

I would add that similar issues apply to libgeotiff, PROJ.4 and a variety
of other packages.  In addition to affecting a variety of open source
packages, these issues also affect a wide variety of proprietary software
vendors who build on these packages.  For instance, the GeoTIFF using
community is "at risk".

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org