[QGIS-Developer] iOS prototyping

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

> On 28 Oct 2018, at 23:31, Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 01:22, Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com> wrote:
> 
>> One (probably unpopular and definitely tedious if not impossible) option might be for us to add an exception to the GPL license used for QGIS allowing its distriibuton via app stores, get every committer who has code in the current codebase to agree to the exception and build iOS packages off that. Though that would still leave a large issue of the dependent libraries that we use that are under GPL where the latter approach is even less feasible. So while I am excited at the idea of running QGIS on my iPad / iPhone I am wondering if this is a dead-end excursion in terms of making QGS generally available on iOS?
>> 
> 
> This is opening a complete can of worms... but I've wondered for a
> while if we need to set up a contributor agreement which grants
> copyright of code to the QGIS organisation, so that we have the
> flexibility to relicense QGIS in future if (and ONLY IF!!)
> required***. Currently we are stuck with the GPLv2 or later license
> forever, but I can definitely see a time when we'd like to drop the
> "v2" and move to a pure "v3 or greater" license, or even relicense
> under something more permissive like the MIT license.
> 
> I see this "stuck with the GPLv2 license FOREVER AND EVER" as a
> potential risk to the project. There's many other open source licenses
> to choose from, including some which MAY be much better to suited for
> the project. But I feel confident that with the right approach,
> careful wording, and legal fine print we could, at this stage of the
> project, get agreement from all current contributors to a copyright
> transfer agreement. So I'd like us to at least have a nice discussion
> about whether this is a good idea or not.

I’m also +1 on this approach (ceding copyright to QGIS.org for any incoming commits). Bigger headache is trying to get all legacy code signed over to QGIS.org. I would also prefer to go MIT or some liberal license. We would still have the issue that all the dependencies we use have their own licenses…. Theoretically we could take a snapshot of the current master, and track down only the committers that have touched that code rather than every historical committer which might make the task marginally easier. Anyhow I guess we are firmly in fantasy land here :-)

Regards

Tim

> 
> Nyall
> 
> *** Hey Trolly mcTrollface: I'm not ever saying QGIS should go closed
> source. Go take your annoying breed of community troublemaking
> elsewhere and let us keep this discussion civil and based on facts
> only.
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—








Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Ex Project chair: QGIS.org

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

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Skype: timlinux 
IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net

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