[postgis-devel] Why PostGIS libraries should not be GPL

[Sakari A. Maaranen]

2010/1/28 Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net>:
> strk wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 05:32:32PM +0200, Sakari A. Maaranen wrote:
>>
>> Oh, and I guess my critique on GPL in that long rant is still generally
>> worth reading, so that was not in vain.  ;-)
>
> To rant on something, it's good to understand the matter.
> Your questions suggest this condition is not fulfilled :-)

If you read my later reply, you should see that the misunderstanding
was purely caused by me reading the wrong copyright notice.  I was
reading the GPL notice of PostGIS in place of where I should have read
the LGPL notice of the JDBC extension.  The matter and the text were
understood quite wel.  It just happened to be the wrong text and a
different matter.  :-)

So the questions were raised by that mistake.  And they were all
answered very much to my satisfaction, when I learned that the
libraries are indeed under the Lesser GPL.  LGPL solves the problem
for me.  I can link to the extension library without it placing too
much restrictions on how I decide to distribute my code.

End of story.

Here's another opinion for you:  We shouldn't need lawyers to
understand our rights.

Oh, and by the way, the questions and the opinions I presented in my
first post are still perfectly valid and applicable to most of the GPL
licensed programming libraries out there.  Fortunately the PostGIS
JDBC extension is not one of those libraries.  Cheers!

If you want to continue the chat, let's take it in private or please
suggest another forum for legal stuff, etc.  This is no longer PostGIS
related, but FOSS general.  (Sorry.)

Br, Sakari