[Proj] ICSM (Australia) transformation file licensing

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Le 19/01/2017 à 03:31, Sebastiaan Couwenberg a écrit :

> I've tried to have a discussion with OGC about the issues with their
> licensing of standards and their implementation in Free Software
> projects several times in the past, all I every got was a reply that
> they would discuss it internally and never heard from them again.
>
Could the "API white paper" (link in my previous email) be seen as a
publication of their current state of though? Their discussions have
been reported in the Open Architecture Board (OAB) sessions in many
recent OGC meetings. The GitHub repository of the API white paper is
public - we can submit merge requests.


> This lead me to give up on ever making progress on this issue, the
> core of geospatial software is simply non-free and the organisations
> involved have not shown willingness to work with the community to
> resolve that.
>
OGC has signed a "memorandum of understanding" with OSGeo [1], giving
OGC membership for free (in my understanding) to a few OSGeo members at
some conditions documented on OSGeo wiki. There is also an agreement
between OGC and the Eclipse Software Foundation. Similar agreement
between OGC and the Apache Software Foundation has been discussed but
not yet materialized. However OGC is already active at Apache, helping
us to organize a "Geospatial track" in both Apache Conferences of 2016.

The OGC/OSGeo memorandum of understanding cites liaison contacts. My
experience with the geospatial track in Apache Conferences is that the
liaison on OGC side is responsive. Maybe your should contact the
liaisons on OSGeo side?


> While I understand the motivations of EPSG, just like I understand
> them of the Dutch Kadaster with whom I've had the same discussion
> after they published their NTv2 correction grids, limiting
> modification is simply incompatible with Free Software licenses.
>
Free software licenses are important, but not necessarily the most
important thing in the world. Some may argue that data integrity is more
important. I do not want to enter in the debate of what is most
important - I just want to said that this issue may require compromise
on both sides, and open source licenses have proved a capability to
adapt to other issues in the past (e.g. Apache-GPL compatibility,
patents, etc.).


> The right to make modifications is simply essential to Free Software.
>
The right to make modifications is not unrestricted in Free Software.
Apache has restrictions (we can not keep the "Apache" name), GPL has
restrictions (we must publish our changes), etc.


> As Greg also mentioned, in practice no one wants to make use of this
> right because that would make their implementation incompatible with
> the rest of the world beating the purpose of standards.
>
Some projects do make incompatible changes (e.g. axis order), sometime
in good faith (e.g. following the path of someone else, e.g. WMS
standard before it was fixed) but the result is still incompatibility.
Another example is the old days when Internet Explorer had its own
interpretation of HTML standard.

    Regards,

        Martin

[1]
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_signs_Memorandum_of_Understanding_with_OGC