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

[Vincent Picavet]

Hi, 

> > 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.

I am pretty confident as well that at least distribution of the ECW dll is not 
permitted. It's probably even worst than that, as I am not sure that even 
linking QGIS-GDAL-ECW is legally doable. A clear statement would need some 
thorough investigation though.
Frank probably has some further thought on this point.

> 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).

Right, but no idea of the technical difficulty there.

Vincent