[postgis-users] liblwgeom and LGPL?

[Brian H Wilson]

On 3/28/13 10:23 AM, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
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> Il 28/03/2013 18:21, Brian H Wilson ha scritto:
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>> If you have a traditional software business model, this is not a "feature", it's a
>> "bug". ;-)
> you can always solve it by rewriting your own software.
> The one we do il GPL for a reason.
> All the best.
With all due respect this is an unhelpful response.

Please understand I am not in this boat, just answering someone's 
question as to why shifting licenses is a problem.

Let's say you are ESRI and have added GDAL to your code base because the 
license lets you do that. If you are that big you could indeed throw 
perhaps a million bucks at re-writing GDAL from scratch. But if you are 
small and have built your business around GDAL (and others) then 
reproducing all that work is impractical. You simply no longer have a 
viable product. It's easy to say everything should be open source but it 
might be difficult for your small company to shift directions and survive.

Without knowing the details I think my using GDAL is a bad example 
because it's so modular. For example you can add the FGDB ESRI code to 
it and have a non-free version (for internal use - you can't distribute 
it). Similarly I think you could add GPL pieces to GDAL and not 
"contaminate" the code base. Only the driver(s) or tools changed to use 
the GPL code would become GPL, the rest would remain X/MIT licensed. I 
am not as familiar with PostGIS so I can't make a cogent comment on it.

Brian