[Proj] Use of SQLite

[Martin Desruisseaux]

Le 21/05/2018 à 17:49, Howard Butler a écrit :

> Sticky philosophical issues aside, from a practical standpoint, an
> industry that wants late-binding out of the GDAL/PROJ/Friends stack
> must recognize that the dictionaries are a critical piece of
> infrastructure to make it all work. EPSG's licensing approach seems to
> me like good intentions mixed with inexperience in open software
> licensing. It would be instructive to explicitly hear what EPSG was
> trying to prevent with its licensing approach rather than trying to
> legal wrangle their license without the context.
>
This topic has been discussed (in a wider context - not specifically
EPSG) in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). They came with the
definition of Open Standard, which is similar to Open Source Software
but not identical. The OGC API white paper [1] defines an Open Standard as:

 1. Freely and publicly available – They are available free of charge
    and unencumbered by patents and other intellectual property.
 2. Non discriminatory – They are available to anyone, any organization,
    any time, anywhere with no restrictions.
 3. No license fees - There are no charges at any time for their use.
 4. Vendor neutral - They are vendor neutral in terms of their content
    and implementation concept and do not favor any vendor over another.
 5. Data neutral – The standards are independent of any data storage
    model or format.
 6. Defined, documented, and approved by a formal, member driven
    consensus process. The consensus group remains in charge of changes
    and no single entity controls the standard.

Note that above definitions does not include the right to modify the
standard; the changes are controlled by a standard body. The reason is
that if anyone was allowed to change a standard, then it would not be a
standard any more. Note that this definition of "Open Standard" has been
done collaboratively with OSGeo [2].

So I think that IOGP sees the EPSG dataset as something closer (but not
fully compliant) to Open Standard than Open Source. I had a chance to
discuss with Roger Lott (an EPSG maintainer) during various OGC
meetings, and my understanding is that their main concern is to make
sure that everyone interpret EPSG codes in the same way. I mean that
coordinate operations performed between the same pairs of EPSG codes
shall produce the same results (up to the accuracy allowed by the
operation) with any standard-compliant software.

    Martin

[1] http://docs.opengeospatial.org/wp/16-019r4/16-019r4.html#_open_standards_and_apis
[2] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Open_Source_and_Open_Standards#Open_Standards

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