MapGuide fork of AGG

[Paul Spencer]

Clarification for those of you not following the mapguide internals  
list, Tom Fukushima announced yesterday that they are not actually  
forking AGG because Thomas found a way that MapGuide could use AGG  
without making any modifications (at this point).  They will be  
sucking in a copy of AGG as they do with all other 3rd party  
libraries but will not be maintaining local changes as a fork.

However, the general opinion now seems to be that the original  
maintainer, Maxim Shemanarev, essentially created a fork in the  
community at the time he relicensed AGG as GPL.  In practical terms,  
Maxim has been committing to the 2.4 code as recently as 2007/09/05.   
The 2.5 code was initially committed on 2006/10/09 and has had two  
commits since it was created which seem to be keeping the two code  
bases in sync only.  Personally, I think he was forced to create a  
relicensed version of his code base when he signed with Scaleform and  
has found a creative way to deal with it.  Unfortunately, he has  
received a lot of bashing from the community for it because he seems  
unable to speak about the change (NDA anyone?).

I think that as long as 2.4 meets our needs and there is no  
development going into 2.5, there is no problem.  The problems will  
start if 2.5 gets some development (that we need) or we (by which I  
mean the geo community) have improvements to make and no where to put  
them.

Cheers

Paul

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|Paul Spencer                          pspencer at dmsolutions.ca    |
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|Chief Technology Officer                                         |
|DM Solutions Group Inc                http://www.dmsolutions.ca/ |
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