Re: [Geotools-devel] Question about LGPL compatible licenses.

[Adrian C. <ac...@gm...>]

Hey,

It would probably be quicker to assemble the list of licenses so we can
talk about real instances rather than staying abstract.

There are two questions bundled into yours: what are we allowed to link
against, and what are we allowed to distribute?

The first of these determines what code can legally be compiled and run
together which for java can be taken loosely to mean 'thrown into the
same jvm'. Geotools' LGPL prevents anyone (except OSGeo since it 'owns'
the code) from linking the code with other code unless the other code
conforms to certain rules. Linking rules are pretty well established if
you look around the network. In general we can link with code that uses
a BSD type license, an Apache type license or an LGPL license, and
probably some others. See the license page on gnu.org for details. Note,
there is no work around to this aspect of licensing.

The second issue revolves around what kind of licenses we are allowed to
redistribute. Given that we need the result to be redistributable as an
LGPL library, the licenses of the library need to be friendly with those
rules. For this, there can be a workaround. At compilation time we can
download all sorts of libraries with maven as long as those were
deployed by someone with the correct rights to redistribute. There are
some libraries, such as the connectors to proprietary databases which
the user has to download separately even absent the compile, so that
step is understood although to get geotools to compile that has
sometimes involved creating a dummy .jar archive.

--adrian

On Tue, 2008-12-23 at 12:00 -0800, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> Do we have a list of the licenses for Java libraries that are
> compatible with LGPL/GeoTools? Do we have a list of licenses that are
> not compatible? I need to each of my dependencies so I can see if I
> can include them.
> 
> If they aren't compatible, is it acceptable to have the user download
> them separately?
> 
> The Sunburned Surveyor
> 
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