Fwd. from the grass devel mailing list. I think the Debian folks have
a better understanding than most of the issues, problems, and
solutions
dealing with a multitude of open source licenses, and might have some
advice here. The development version of GRASS (6.1-cvs) now has basic
support for SWIG interfaces.
cheers for any insights,
Hamish
====================================================================
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 10:39:44 -0700
From: "ASU Exchange" <michael.barton at asu.edu>
To: grass5 at grass.itc.it
Cc: grass-abm at grass.itc.it
Subject: [GRASS5] Re: grass5 digest, Vol 1 #2143 - 10 msgs
The issue here is not helping a non-GPL project. It is helping GRASS
and enhancing open source software.
The place where I've run into problems most recently is working to
develop an interface to make agent based modeling tools available to
GRASS and GIS (in GRASS) available to open source agent based
modeling platforms. A major system, with which we are working is
released under BSD. A very useful interface we'd like to use is
(SWIG) released under MIT. Because of the work the ABM folks do and
clients they have, they feel that they cannot make their software
GPL--although it is open-source licensed. They feel strongly about
being open source and about being ethical with regards to licenses--
both commendable things. The licensing incompatibility is making it
difficult to find a way to make GRASS and Java ABM platforms interact
in a useful way. Not impossible, I hope, but it has added a
significant layer of complication and considerably restricted the
ways in which we can develop this interaction.
I'm not saying that we should make GRASS non-GPL, but hoping that we
can find productive avenues to work with other open-source platforms
that are not GPL (expanding the user, developer, and support base as
well as making GRASS better).
Michael