[Qgis-developer] ESRI FileGDB support on Mac OS X using Homebrew

[John C. Tull]

Hi William,

On Nov 19, 2012, at 4:53 PM, William Kyngesburye <woklist at kyngchaos.com> wrote:

> On Nov 19, 2012, at 11:43 AM, John C. Tull wrote:
> 
>> If you manage it, please report back. My workaround is clunky, but it works for me.  A usable, more elegant approach would be nice to have. If the simple method works for you or others, then I probably have something else wrong with my system that I would need to sort out.
>> 
> If it's just a question of FGDB support for GDAL (and QGIS), I've been sitting on a FGDB plugin for my GDAL framework.  2 problems have been holding me back: the license is unclear if the DLLs can be distributed with open source software (or any software at all), and even if that was allowed, all Esri software has an export limitation that I am not capable of enforcing in my downloads.
> 
> The only option I can think of is to have users download and install the FGDB API themselves and my plugin will use that (I did that long ago with the OCI plugin).  I could craft my installer to make that painless.  Other open source software does a similar thing with incompatible licenses.

The latter approach sounds like a good and acceptable means of making this available to all the framework users out there, which is probably 99% of all QGIS mac users. I think you have to create a free ESRI account to download the api, so you are most likely in safe territory having users that require FileGDB signing on and agreeing to ESRI's license on their own. Thanks for chiming in on this and proposing a good solution!

Regards,
John