[Proj] ICSM (Australia) transformation file licensing

Even Rouault even.rouault at spatialys.com
Wed Jan 18 11:34:38 PST 2017


> PROJ.4 using the EPSG name is indeed a problem that should be fixed.

The issue with axis order is not only found in the proj.4/geotiff/GDAL/etc software stack, but 
it is also deeply anchored in OGC standards themselves, so I don't see it to be solved any time 
soon.

See this excellent retrospective from Carl Reed:
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2016-October/000989.html

And even some recent OGC standards still don't respect EPSG axis order, or at least this is my 
interpretation of the GeoPackage standard 
(http://www.geopackage.org/spec/) mentionning in footnote 11 : 

The axis order in WKB is always (x,y{,z}{,m}) where x is easting or longitude, y is northing or 
latitude, z is optional elevation and m is optional measure. 

and mandating the EPSG:4326 definition to be:
GEOGCS ["WGS 84", DATUM ["World Geodetic System 1984", SPHEROID["WGS 84", 6378137, 
298.257223563 , AUTHORITY["EPSG","7030"]], AUTHORITY["EPSG","6326"]], 
PRIMEM["Greenwich", 0 , AUTHORITY["EPSG","8901"]], UNIT["degree", 
0.017453292519943278, AUTHORITY["EPSG","9102"]], AUTHORITY["EPSG","4326"] 

so with no explicit axis order.

> I'm my opinion, all organisations publishing national grid shift files
> should consider they're stance on limiting modifications. The French and
> New Zealand grids are public domain, and the Hungarian grid is GPL-2+.
> They apparently consider compatibility with Free Software projects more
> important than limiting modification.

+1. While I can understand the motivation from authoritative sources to not see their data to 
be modified and misused, so as not to alter their credibility, the practical implications of 
restricting changes is a practical burden. Open source software and open data also leave the 
door open to the possibility of doing non-sense with them, and that's perfectly fine. As 
raised, even if the original data is unaltered, the software can still make a wrong use of it 
anyway.

One simple solution to solve the issue of allowing modifications while not presenting 
modified data as being the one from the original provider is to have a clause similar to the 
one found in the ZLib license :
"""Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software"""


Even

-- 
Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
http://www.spatialys.com
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