Hello folks, All GIS packages (from fedora-extras now fedora) suffer a missing of geodetic constants sets from www.epsg.org (very important for GIS otherwise) becouse of license issues. I personaly tried to add some packages to fedora and maintain those, but basicly some of tham are pure repack of tarballs and removal of some doubted piece of code. I am a GIS fan, i tryed my very best to shape and polish up all GIS related packages and its related libs: ogdi, gdal, grass, mapserver, but without geodetic constants is like in math trigonometry without PI constant ... Its very frustrating that tons of GIS code depends on a simple collection of 'constants' like PI one from math, in a simple excel like file ... The problem, more exactly, is with this dataset aviable at: http://www.epsg.org, (the organisation who collected datasets and made them aviable), under EPSG Version 6.12 Online Documentation there is an 'Use of data' section with the license, you can follow it to read. The hurting license text is: 3. The data may not be distributed for profit by any third party; After some mail excenge between OSSgeo (http://www.ossgeo.org) chairman who is olso very interested as open source party of GIS, me and other folks, EPSG proposed a draft and called OSgeo to review it. Fortunatley OSgeo has no lawyer they kindly pass this away with the reason that they are not lawyers too :) and the whole thing remain stalled. I would like if someone look into attached proposal from OSgeo, and if its OK i would like to invite him to help me out in a possible discuss with Roger Lott (chairman of EPSG) as per a good law technical one. I attach the new version of license draft proposed by EPSG itself, a preliminary verdict that validate its usability for open source scope would be fine , before start to talk with EPSG ... BTW, There is extremly nice and powerfull GIS software, like http://grass.itc.it/ wich can easy compete GIS software giant: http://www.esri.com. This would be great if happen :) /christian
Attachment:
EPSG dataset terms of use 2007-03-13.doc
Description: MS-Word document
Attachment:
pgpReaB1Z6c2r.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging