[Incubator] [Fwd: RE: Oracle Spatial and Open Source]

[Frank Warmerdam]

Rich Steele wrote:
> You may very well be OK with the open source requirement, depending on
> how you incorporate the oracle jar into your LGPL'd application, whether
> you modify it, etc.  But I don't see how you get out of the numerous
> "Program Distribution" requirements.  It seems to me that you would need
> Oracle to waive these requirements, or require users to separately
> download the files from Oracle themselves (so Geotools isn't doing the
> distribution).

Chris / Rich,

These are the sorts of issues we run into all the time.  Vendors who want
to be "open source friendly", but their lawyers still embed all sorts of
restrictions in their license that precludes distribution as part of an
open source package.   And these are the sorts of things we as a foundation
should now be pretty careful about.

Of course, if an outside organization wants to prepare a binary distribution
that "takes risks" that's up to them.  But foundation projects actions need
to be correct and we should warn binary distribution builders of these issues.

It is similarly difficult to distribute binaries that support SDE, MrSID and
even the ECW license used to non-free (not so sure about now).

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