[Qgis-developer] Re: import proprietary code inside a python plugin

[Alister Hood]

> Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:06:19 +0200
> From: Vincent Picavet <vincent.ml at oslandia.com>
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] Re: import proprietary code inside a python plugin
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > In osgeo4w the gdal-ecw DLLs are released binary compiled. I never needed
> > to compile them by myself. Are you saying that osgeo4w is doing something
> > incorrect?

I guess with OSGeo4W you can install just GDAL (and gdal-ecw) and it will be under the MIT license.
If you install GDAL and QGIS they must be under the GPL.
So in theory you shouldn't be able to install all three?  It doesn't really seem to work... perhaps this demonstrates an inherent problem with the whole system of software licensing.

> The gdal/ecw case is particularly complex, as the ECW licence changes
> regularly and is some kind of opensource but not really.

The "new" read-only ECW dlls that are distributed in the QGIS Windows installer are not at all open source.  Paolo said something not long ago about needing to talk to Erdas to clarify the situation, as apparently at one stage they granted special permission to redistribute them with QGIS.  But I'm pretty sure after this conversation that they are *not* redistributable with QGIS.  The license on the "new" dlls has changed at least once, but I don't see how it could affect this conversation, as it has never been GPL compatible.

The "old" read-write ECW libs that are typically used on linux can supposedly be distributed with GPL software, so I think it would make sense to use them also on Windows (especially since they are read-write).