[postgis-devel] License

[Stephen Frost]

* Obe, Regina (robe.dnd at cityofboston.gov) wrote:
> 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. 

Agreed.

> 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.

Yeah, changes would almost certainly need to be done with the PG release
cycle..  It's possible that patches, etc, could be done seperately, but
if there are serious enough bugs for that, I expect the PG folks would
be willing to put out a point release (or include the change in a point
release), if it's a bug fix.  For new features, it'd need to be through
the PG major versions, of course.  I don't know that putting out a
new-feature patch against something in core would work very well..

	Thanks,

		Stephen

> -----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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