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Re: [DebianGIS] Re: [Qgis-user] ECW Licence



On Mon, Jan 08, 2007 at 11:54:47AM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
> >I also find 'similar to GPL
> >and at no charge' is a quite rough definition of the spirit of FOSS. In
> >a few words, ECW almost-free license needs major revisions... 
> 
> Francesco,
> 
> I would concur that the current public use license is not very precise.  I
> believe that ERMapper uses "GPL-like" to mean any truely open source 
> software
> but of course that is not clearly stated, and for a legally cautious
> organization like Debian it is likely not acceptable.
> 
> I would suggest taking the concerns directly to ERMapper.  For instance,
> start a thread on the issue in the ECW SDK forum hosted by ERMapper.
> 
> OSGeo is also likely to need to do a legal analysis of the ECW SDK and
> I'd appreciate if you let me know if you do start such a thread so I
> can follow and participate in it as well.
> 
> Best regards,
> -- 

Well, I have currently some issue in subscribing the forum (maybe the
confirmation request is eated by anti-spam measures on murphy), anyway
the most relevant post is

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.pkg.general/867/match=ecw+sdk+licencing+feedback

Where Tom Lynch reports:

--
Some examples of use cases of the SDK under the "Public Use" License
Agreement:

used as a GDAL driver - no problem here

used as a GDAL driver in a FOSS project like MapServer - no problem

used as a GDAL driver in a commercial, closed source product - NOT OK
(would need to use "Free" or "Commercial" licenses and the product would
 need to meet the additional requirements of these licenses)

used as a GDAL driver in a commercial, open source product - may or may not
be OK, depending on the situation.
---

So AFAIK the current almost-free licesing is not perceived as an issue
by ERMapper folks. Unfortunately, I still think GDAL MIT license is simply not
compatible with the GPL-compatible license. Which renders
undistributable also pure GPL sw which use GDAL as their inner engine.

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine



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