[Incubator] Code Review

[Markus Neteler]

Frank,

On 3/29/06, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
...
> I may have emailed the author at the time for permission but I didn't make
> any notation to that effect.  AT least I have likely contact information
> I could use.  The url doesn't work anymore, due to reorganizations at
> JetBlue's web site.

Here is a way to fetch the old web page:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.jetbyte.com/Source/COM/OLEDB/oledb.htm

...
> In general I think most of the above is likely OK, but at the very least
> I think it is the sort of thing that we need to dig up for further review
> and discussion.  I would certainly appreciate guidance.

In general I think that we should handle such issues rather strictly to
avoid later complications. At least, files in question should be tagged
(to make them easily 'find'able) or extracted into a non-free directory
or so.

Say, we should avoid that later on a single file issue can blow up
the entire project in case that it is covering central functionality.

That's why we took LZW compression out of GRASS *although' there
was explicit permission to use it which was given before it became
a patent (AFAIK). We substituted it with ZLIB compression which was
a major pain as all users had to migrate all their integer raster maps...

But I am no legal expert (is Rich reading this list?)

Best

 Markus