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

[Even Rouault]

Selon Vincent Picavet <vincent.ml at oslandia.com>:

> 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.

Actually, Frank tried to address this in the following RFC :
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/rfc34_license_policy . It went to the discussion
stage (there is a thread somewhere on gdal-dev) but not further. It is not clear
where the responsibility belongs to. Likely not at the level of each individual
project, but more at the level of the packaging system (OSGeo4W for example). In
practice, the problem can come only if one of the copyright holders of QGIS
wants to exercice his rights given by the GPL.

>
> > 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.

I believe that Tamas Szekeres in his daily builds at
http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk/ uses the 3.3 SDK under Windows.

>
> Vincent
>
>
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