[Qgis-psc] [QGIS-Developer] Environmental policy

[Even Rouault]

Regarding

> prohibit the use of QGIS to the fossil-fuels industry.

and

> ...may I suggest to add GLOBAL PEACE & WAR issues to this QGIS
> discussion on environmental questions ?

That's not a good idea IHMO. Don't mix licensing & ethics. Free software 
licenses explicitly don't discriminate against fields of endehavor (see clause 
6 of https://opensource.org/osd-annotated ), and adding discrimination is 
currently generally considered as being a bad idea and likely not enforcable 
in most juridictions, although they are debates around attempts at having 
ethical open source licensing
(https://medium.com/@gmcgath/the-futility-of-the-hippocratic-license-b6a9ad981dec).

Things can get really complex. For example, regarding prohibiting the use to 
the fossil-fuels industry, what about car makers: should they be considered as 
being part of the fossil-fuel industry, and thus prohibited from using the 
software and thus using proprietary mapping solution instead, etc etc. (Open 
Source) licensing is (or is perceived to be) a sufficiently complex topic 
already to not complicate it further.

Personal note: my contributions to FOSS4G related software all started because 
I was able to use them in the context of working in the defense industry in my 
past life: is it about peace or war ? both, depending from the point of view.

I should also remind, that for good or worse, the EPSG database that is 
critical to proper CRS management in our software is mostly maintained by 
IOGP.

The world is complex.

Even

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