On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 16:41 +0200, Balint Cristian wrote: > 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 ... The new license looks ok to me, I will pass it along to the FSF for review, even though the EPSG dataset is content, not code, their opinion is always valued on licensing matters. ~spot -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
