Re: [Pyogclib-developers] ChangeLog and License

[Jan-Oliver W. <ja...@in...>]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 01:49:37PM -0400, Jean-Francois.Doyon@CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca wrote:
> About the license: Personally I like it liberal :) I don't want to impose
> Open-Source'ness on others. So that's why I'm going along with the choice of
> MIT license.  Also, as Sean stated, it follows the licenses used by many
> other open GIS tools such as GDAL/OGR and UMN MapServer, and is less likely
> to cause confusion if someone were to implement some sort of GIS processing
> system that is made up of all of these but with difference licenses. The
> more flexible, the fewer worries, IMHO.

Most of the Free Software GIS code base is covered by freedom-protecting
licenses (e.g. GRASS, OSSIM, Thuban; GRASS was the largest Free Software
project in general for quite some time).
LGPLed modules integrate nicely with modules of various license types.
Licenses that do not protect freedom are good for distributing proprietary
branches that do not intend to share modifications, bugfixes,
enhancements with others.
The better freedom is protected, the less worries IMHO :-)
However, it is always upto the authors to decide on the licenses
under which they want the software to be released. I just expressed my
honest opinion for the archives that I think LGPL would suit better than
MIT/X11.

> Indeed, thuban looks like a cool tool indeed, I'm going to have to give it a
> try soon :) I now realize you're the man behind the Python PROJ interface,
> which Frank sent me a while back, and I have been using with Zope ... It'd
> be nice to have it merged into the PROJ distribution :)

Actually, it was not me, but my collegue Bernhard Herzog who did some
Python wrapping. It is on the todo list to submit the python wrappers
upstream. Hm, the todo list is long though ;-)

> Although I can see uses for a WFS Cient in thuban, I have to admit it
> wouldn't be a killer add-on yet.  What might be of interest though is the
> fact that as part of the WFS implementation, there is the beginning of some
> GML support, which could in turn be used to read GML files, much in the same
> way you would read shapefiles.  But then again I guess OGR has that already
> ? Or the beginnings of it ? I think support was added as part of various
> MapServer OGC improvements, though it looks liek it isn't documented yet.

OGR support is on the todo list as well.
If WMS layers should seamlessly work within Thuban eventually, WFS
is necessary at some point.

We have to introduce two small feature into Thuban and after
this it is possible to release a first experimental WMSLayer
extension.

When do you expect to make the first release?

I would be interested in helping to get pyogclib into
Debian as soon as possible after its first release.
(We are currently busy in getting gdal/ogr into Debian :-)

Best

	Jan
-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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