[mapserver-users] Mapserver equivalent for .NET

[Steve Lime]

I agree with Frank. The liberal MapServer license was chosen for a reason. I always figured
that to be accepted you had to put out a good product AND it must be easy to use with as little
restrictions as possible. I believe that people are generally good and will contribute back to the 
project. The incentive to do so is high assuming they want to continue to leverage the project 
over time. Merging local changes with new versions of MapServer would be a huge pain, so sharing 
makes sense.

IMHO that organizations or individuals that would abuse a project will do so regardless of license.

Steve

>>> On 2/29/2008 at 10:41 AM, in message <47C835B7.70702 at pobox.com>, Frank
Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> Tim Bowden wrote:
>> On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 13:32 +0100, Tamas Szekeres wrote:
>>> I'm not aware of any compelling reason to switch to a more restrictive
>>> license. 
>> 
>> Sure, the current licensing arrangement seems to be working well for
>> mapserver, though there are sometimes reasons to be less permissive.  I
>> speculated about this the other day in a different context
>> 
> (http://blog.mapforge.com.au/index.php/2008/02/27/when-open-source-doesnt-add-up/) 
> Perhaps I'm wrong.  I'd like to get others thoughts on this /without/ 
> starting a flame war (off list if you like; It's not mapserver specific).  I 
> realise there can be strong feelings about licensing but so long as it's open 
> source I'm not too worried.
> 
> Tim,
> 
> My attempts to register with your blog seem to have failed, so I'm going to
> reply briefly here.
> 
> In referencing MySQL as an example of the GPL being a strongly license, you
> need to be clear that MySQL AB's value as a company is based on the fact 
> that
> they can offer non-GPL licensing to licensors of MySQL because they retain
> copyright ownership of all the MySQL code.  That is, they have retained a
> degree of control of the project that no-one could have over MapServer at
> this point and they use that control to squeeze money out of folks not
> willing to comply with GPL terms.
> 
> That is a reasonable model for open source business, but it can't work for
> MapServer at this point and in any event I find it the antithesis of 
> building
> a "community of equality" where all participants can potentially have equal
> influence if they are willing to contribute equally.
> 
> Beyond the fact that it would be impractical to change now, I think the
> current permissive license for MapServer has been one of it's "secrets to
> success".  Companies building products like MapDotNet on MapServer is a
> good thing, and with a bit of encouragement such organizations are generally
> willing to contribute to and support MapServer to some degree (as does
> already occur in this particular case).
> 
> I *do* wish we had a way to turn "interest in supporting" into direct
> maintenance on the core via a sponsorship program as has worked fairly
> well for GDAL.
> 
> Best regards,