[postgis] License issues

[Sondheim, Mark ELP:EX]

I specifically like the idea of stating "that the license maybe changed, in
the future, to BSD so everyone who does contribute would have already agreed
to the move." I also think think that Dave's notion about potentially
treating the interfaces differently is of interest. - Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Blasby [mailto:dblasby at refractions.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 12:11 PM
To: postgis at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [postgis] License issues


There's been some discussion on licenses, and I thought I'd put in my 2
cents worth.

	People have been giving some good reasons for having PostGIS
released
under the BSD-type license.  
	One of these is direct inclusion inside the PostgreSQL distribution.

Although this would be nice, I don't think its all that important - we
can package it so that people just have to load a RPM or run a
setup.exe.  This is important so we can update PostGIS and still have it
available in older version of PostgreSQL.  I don't want to force people
to upgrade their DB server just to get a later version of PostGIS.  If
you take a look at the old geometry functionality, it's almost
impossible to use a newer version of it without installing a newer
version of the server.  Although this might not be a so much problem
once a 'finished'-like version of PostGIS is released, it certainly is a
problem now.
	The other reason for the BSD-type license was that it might draw
better
support from corporations.  This might be true, but it might also be
false.  Under the BSD, they can take the code, make some improvements,
and then close it.  That's something I don't want to happen; if they're
going to take my work for free, they have to give something back to the
community.  That's the open-source social contract.  The GPL tries to
stop this type of 'cheater'.
	That being said, I don't think a corporate entity would actually
take
PostGIS and close it - most of the intellectual property is in how
things interconnect with PostgreSQL and the GiST indexing.  The actual
underlying code is pretty trivial, and useless once its outside
PostgreSQL.

	Lets say that someone creates a do_something_complicated() function
(say line/polygon/point buffering).  It's a part of their commercial
offering, but they want it available in PostGIS.  I'd be happy to work
someway to allow it to be released without compromising their
interested.  My feelings are that open-source is about sharing and
should be easy for everyone involved.  In this case one possible
solution is that a very simple GPL wrapper could call their function in
its own .so file.  

	I'd be happy to change PostGIS's license so it could interconnect
with
other open-source-type licenses.  I also want to use other open-source
software (like PROJ.4 and JTS) inside PostGIS.  That way I can stand on
the 'shoulders of giants', and others can stand on my shoulders.

	The external interfaces are another issue.   I'm happy to release
them
under a different license than the actual PostGIS core.  For example,
the mapserver-PostGIS connector is part of the core mapserver
distribution and probably under a BSD-type license.  Same with frank's
OGR code.  I think that's fine.

	Perhaps all we have to do is explicitly define what is and isn't
allowed with PostGIS's IP.  Another possible compromise would be to
explicitly state that the license maybe changed, in the future, to BSD
so everyone who does contribute would have already agreed to the move. 
That way there would be no hard feelings. 

dave


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