[postgis-devel] License

[Obe, Regina]

Paul,

I'm all for it.  Not that there would be a risk of PostGIS ever losing its
preferred standing, but its always bothered me that it is not integrated as 
spatial is with other databases. The GPL also confuses the hell out of people
as to whether they can use it commercially what they have to give back and so forth. 

Though on the down-side could slow things down since I presume that would mean
we have to be more conscious of our moves relative to PostgreSQL.  Then again we try to be anyway.

Thanks,
Regina



-----Original Message-----
From: postgis-devel-bounces at postgis.refractions.net on behalf of Paul Ramsey
Sent: Wed 2/4/2009 1:17 PM
To: PostGIS Development Discussion
Subject: [postgis-devel] License
 
David Fetter from PgSQL has been bugging me about bringing PostGIS
into PgSQL proper. As it stands now, doing so is not possible: PostGIS
is GPL, PgSQL is BSD. The only way it would work would be to
re-license, and that would require the approval of all the copyright
holders, basically all the major authors, ever.

I used to just not contemplate this stuff, but things like this
<http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/GIS_Functions> give me pause. Perhaps I
am over-valuing the advantage "built-in" features have over add-ons,
particularly with things like the new PgSQL package distribution
system. Maybe this could be solved with PgSQL giving selected add-ons
(like ours) better marketing in the main site, rather than integrating
the code itself.

However, I am interested to hear what other people think. Whether
integrating would be a good idea, in general. Whether attempting to do
it would be worth the hassle, in practice.

For reference, this is the PgSQL license:

http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence


P
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