[mapguide-dev] Planning to release MapGuide Open Source 1.1.0 next week on November 30th, 2006

[Frank Warmerdam]

Andy Morsell wrote:
> And, a topic previously brought up, what it would take to include ECW 
> and MrSID support with the GDAL provider.

Andy,

As promised I have done a brief legal review of the ECW SDK and MrSID SDK
license terms.  The analysis, along with the agreements it is based on can be
found at:

   http://www.gdal.org/tmp/sdk_review.zip

The brief summary is:

  o I don't see any problem with OSGeo distributing MapGuide+FDO binaries that
    include the ECW SDK for ECW and JPEG2000 support *as long as* we are only
    distributing open source components in the binaries.  The ECW "public use"
    license requires us to provide source on demand for any part of the
    resulting application which we cannot do for the MrSID SDK.  This may also
    preclude use of some other things (like including OCI DLLs with an Oracle
    provider).

  o The MrSID SDK license still includes a few things that I think are "scary"
    for OSGeo to take responsibility for, including a requirement for a
    click-through EULA, enforcing "export controls", and limitations on
    third-party re-distribution of applications including the SDK (that violates
    the LGPL requirements for fdo for instance).

Assuming no other closed source components are being used, I think we should
include ECW support in the release binaries, and we should leave it up to
third parties to offer the MrSID support as a GDAL plugin.  Perhaps you
as an interested user would like to take that on?  I'd be willing to help
you build a redistributable plugin that folks could drop into their mapguide
distribution for mrsid support.

If Autodesk legal or others would like to comment, I'm interested in feedback.
But I do think we need to take a low risk approach for anything distributed by
OSGeo.

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 OSGeo, http://osgeo.org