[Incubator] Mapbender Incubator Process

Frank Warmerdam warmerdam at pobox.com
Wed Apr 5 16:22:18 EDT 2006


Rich Steele wrote:
> Frank's approach is fine.  Since there is no stated license restriction,
> you can incorporate this code into MB and license it under GPL.  There
> are some folks who think "public domain" of this sort isn't even valid
> in the US (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225).  Others disagree
> (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/)  Outside the US, the
> concept of public domain varies.  In the end, it boils down to whether
> you believe the author of this code is going to change his/her mind and
> revoke whatever "license" is implied by a "public domain" dedication.
> Personally, I think this is fine to use as you intend to.  There is no
> need to give the original author credit, but it certainly is the karmic
> thing to do.

Rich,

Beyond the karmic benefit, my thinking was that by giving the original
author credit in the file, we show a certain seriousness about keeping
track of the history of our code.  So, for instance, when I apply a
license to previously public domain code I generally add that as a note
in the header area in case a question comes up in the future.

 > For those, like GDAL and Proj.4 in MapGuide
> Enterprise, we have typically just reproduced the required notices in a
> LICENSE.htm file in the source code.  

What required notices are you referring to?  The GDAL license reads:

  * Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
  * copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
  * to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
  * the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
  * and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
  * Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
  *
  * The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
  * in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
  *
  * THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
  * OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
  * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
  * THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
  * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
  * FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
  * DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

When it says "the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the software"  I have always
read that to mean that you can't strip the copyright/license notice out of
the source code.  I have never taken that to mean that users of GDAL were
required to reproduce the notice in any user readable location.  In fact,
the old BSD license did have this requirement and this is considered a very
dangerous requirement since it is not always easy to comply with.

In fact, in my GDAL review I have identified a few bits of code with credit
requirements and I have marked these for further consideration since I am
clearly not currently complying with this request, and it is a lot to ask
of all GDAL applications to add a bunch of extra notices.

> We also link to a third party
> notices file from the about box of the executable.
> 
> The two LGPL'd libraries (phpmailer and javascript vectorgraphics) can
> be handled similarly, although the LGPL requirements are slightly
> different.

I'm a bit confused.  Mapbender is LGPL, right?  And these items are LGPL?
Is there an incompatibility here?  I wouldn't have thought that Mapbender
would need to do anything special at all to incorporate other LGPL code.

I don't mean to belabour fine points here, but I think these discussions
can be quite helpful to other projects in incubation, including my own.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
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





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