[Incubator] Bezitopo and PerfectTIN

[Pierre Abbat]

On Monday, 6 January 2020 17.31.31 EST Jody Garnett wrote:
> Thanks!
> 
> Going over our quick checklist ...
> 
> https://github.com/phma/bezitopo
> 1. Geospatial
> - README - described as "land surveying programming" so very much geospatial
> - I would recommend changing to README.md markdown if you are hosted on
> GitHub

Can you recommend a Markdown editor, or at least viewer, so that I can see 
what it'll look like before I commit it?

> 2. Open Source
> - File headers have LGPL boilerplate, indicating "You should have received
> a copy of the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License
> along with Bezitopo"
> - I do not see a LICENSE.txt or LICENSE.md included in the source code
> repository? ...
> - aside: Amusingly GitHub picked up
> <https://github.com/phma/bezitopo/community> that the COPYING file was GPL,
> and I see COPYING.LESSER is LGPL. These two do not mix!
> - Can you explain why two licenses are present? The terms of GPL mean that
> any LGPL code you are bundling here is actually distributed as GPL...

See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html . Putting software under the 
LGPL requires both files. One is the GPL; the other says that the software may 
be combined with other programs that are not (L)GPL licensed under certain 
conditions.

Transmer, one of the Bezitopo programs, is GPL licensed because it uses the 
FFTW library. But it's not installed and only developers have any reason to 
use it. Transmer computes coefficients for transverse Mercator projections, 
which are in a file included in the source distribution.

Part of Bezitopo is a library, which I've used in some personal projects, and 
which a company is proposing to use as a plugin to another CAD program. 
PerfectTIN is not yet a library, but another company wants to call it from 
their program.

In Quadlods (not geospatial), the library is one source file and its header, 
and the rest of the program is GPL licensed. I didn't do that with Bezitopo 
because the library is many files.

> 3. Accepts contributions
> - AUTHORS <https://github.com/phma/bezitopo/blob/master/AUTHORS> shows one
> person
> - pull-requests <https://github.com/phma/bezitopo/pulls> shows 0, ...
> - Recommend adding a CONTRIBUTING.md (shown to contributors when they make
> a pull-request) so you can be clear the project is open to working with
> others

What should go in the CONTRIBUTING file?

As I mentioned earlier, I've had no offers of contributions. I've asked for 
contributions to Bezitopo years ago, and I've had some "help wanted" issues in 
Github, but no one's offered to help with the issues. Back in 2015, someone 
tried to help, but he didn't write any code, and it turned out that he didn't 
understand what he was doing.

Pierre
-- 
ve ka'a ro klaji la .romas. se jmaji