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

[Andy Morsell]

Frank,
Thanks for looking into that and I totally agree that we need to be as low
risk as possible when it comes to this kind of thing.  I do hope that
Autodesk can provide some legal muscle to look into these issues.  Yes, I
would be willing to supply MrSID as a plug-in for the GDAL provider, but
would have to make sure that I would not be putting myself or company in any
legally compromising positions either. 

Again, we really need a lawyer to look at this stuff so I'm hoping that
Autodesk can help make that happen.


Andy 

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Warmerdam [mailto:warmerdam at pobox.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 1:18 PM
To: dev at mapguide.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [mapguide-dev] Planning to release MapGuide Open Source 1.1.0
next week on November 30th, 2006

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


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