[mapguide-internals] License status of MapGuide Open Source and FDO

[Jackie Ng]

To whom it may concern at Autodesk that still gets/reads emails from these
mailing lists (I've also cc'd in emails of some adsk devs I know to still
be making commits).

Today I saw several commits made in the MapGuide SVN repo (example:
https://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/changeset/9868) which changed the standard
LGPL 2.1 header of some files to the following text:

// (C) Copyright 2021 by Autodesk, Inc.
//
// The information contained herein is confidential, proprietary
// to Autodesk,  Inc.,  and considered a trade secret as defined
// in section 499C of the penal code of the State of California.
// Use of  this information  by  anyone  other  than  authorized
// employees of Autodesk, Inc.  is granted  only under a written
// non-disclosure agreement,  expressly  prescribing  the  scope
// and manner of such use.

I am not a legal expert, but a basic reading of this text suggests to me
that Autodesk is intending to "close off" the /sandbox/adsk/trunk branch

Up until now, I have been adopting a policy of cherry picking any worthy
fixes from this branch into mapguide trunk.

Having seen this legal text be introduced into this branch, I now must ask
this question:

Is /sandbox/adsk/trunk no longer licensed under LGPL 2.1? If so, what date
did this change of license take effect?

Having asked this question about MapGuide, I now must ask the same question
for FDO and its "commercial" branch (/sandbox/adsk/main) and whether this
statement from David Ji (david.ji at autodesk.com) made to fdo-internals on
August 5, 2019 is still relevant (key parts underlined):

Hi All,

We would like to reiterate Autodesk commitment regarding this Open
Source project.

FDO is and will continue to be a key component to AutoCAD Map 3D,
Autodesk Civil 3D and Autodesk InfraWorks products and Autodesk will
continue contributing to this project. Our focus will be but not
limited to defect fixing, 3rd party upgrade, Visual Studio migration
and more. * All the commits will be submitted to an ADSK branch, so
everybody can see and leverage those*.

At the same time, we would like to delegate to the community decisions
on which commits they would like to merge from ADSK to a Trunk branch.
This delegation would not detract from our commitment to this project
but to rather encourage more contributors to be involved in this open
source project.

Best regards,

David


I would like clarification from Autodesk on this matter as soon as possible.

Regards,

- Jackie

-- 
http://themapguyde.blogspot.com