MapServer and Foundation naming

[Daniel Morissette]

I am not a lawyer, but I think the different license may be an issue 
that we'll need to address, especially with respect to sharing small 
blocks of code or patches. i.e. code submitted to the LGPL software may 
require the author to resubmit it again to the MIT-licensed software 
since we cannot (I don't think) embed LGPL code inside a MIT-licensed 
software. AFAIK, using MIT code inside a LGPL package would be fine 
since the MIT licesne is more permissive than LGPL.

Once again, I am not a lawyer, but that's definitely one issue that will 
need to be dealt with eventually.

For whole libraries, though, I don't think it will be an issue. MIT 
licensed software can link with LGPL and vice-versa AFAIK.

Daniel

Paul Spencer wrote:
> I can't see the license of MapServer changing (modified MIT X11 I  
> think) so my guess is that this type of sharing will only happen as  the 
> licenses permit it.  The LGPL is certainly less restrictive that  the 
> GPL so libraries of code could probably be shared if they are  used as a 
> whole piece, but copying only some lines of code from the  code base 
> would probably be against the license.
> 
> 
> On 30-Nov-05, at 4:59 PM, Attila Csipa wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday 30 November 2005 19:27, P Kishor wrote:
>>
>>> It is still not clear what exactly will Autodesk's codebase  contribute
>>> to the MapServer codebase, if anything at all. Will it, won't it?  Will
>>> it forever be a separate but equal product? Why does it even need the
>>> MapServer foundation?
>>
>>
>>> Daniel wrote:
>>> Some of the benefits of both projects working together will be  sharing
>>> of underlying libraries and code. Some obvious ones are the FDO/ 
>>> OGR/GDAL
>>> data access libs, but there will be more over time.
>>
>>
>> Withe regard to the licensing issue, I for one would like to hear  the 
>> stance
>> on this, too. You see, the Autodesk product was released under LGPL  and
>> Mapserver under a very different license. Using the _code_ (as in  not 
>> whole
>> libraries) from the autodesk offering would necessitate the change of
>> Mapserver licensing, or am I wrong on this one ? I'm not sure the
>> ramifications of this are all that apparent - MapServer had a much  
>> more free
>> (IIRC BSD style) license. Many of you may not have followed the  
>> discussions
>> but this is gaining importance as the upcoming GPL v3 has some  important
>> changes wrt web applications.
>>
> 
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> |Paul Spencer                           pspencer at dmsolutions.ca   |
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> |Applications & Software Development                              |
> |DM Solutions Group Inc                 http://www.dmsolutions.ca/|
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>