Re: [DebianGIS] cfitsio3 goes GPL in Debian, so what about GDAL?

[Hamish <hamish_nospam@yahoo.com>]

Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
> About licensing I have to note also that we have some pending issue
> that I hope strongly will be solved before lenny release, else we will
> have to split gdal in a non-free and free components or in the worst
> case move it into non-free. The latter would imply that a great part
> of d-gis would move to contrib (i.e. out of Debian).

Would it be useful to maintain an "issues" page on the wiki for these?
Maybe more reliable than trusting our memories + searching the ML
archives.

Perhaps we could make use of the GDAL plugin infrastructure for
GPL-problematic GDAL drivers? Right now AFAIK the grass-plugin is the
only thing that uses that (libgdal-grass source pkg); is there any
reason why other drivers couldn't be split out as well? (and then we
just keep those drivers in the Debian/contrib archives for the legally
adventurous).



Moving off on a tangent- currently in Unstable we have binary packages
named libgdal1-1.4.0, but version 1.4.1. From gdal.org NEWS file: "The
GDAL 1.4.1 release is a stable release, and contains the following bug
fixes. There should be no noteworthy changes in interfaces or APIs."

Would it be better to name those packages libgdal1-1.4, or are we just
lucky this time that the changes are minimal enough not to warrant a
change. Or has the ABI changed and the packages should now be in new
ones named libgdal1-1.4.1*?



And onto another tangent (while we are peripherally on the subject of
Debian approved licenses), I hope it will be possible in future to
package the GRASS sample data datasets for Debian/main.

These are the venerable Spearfish County, South Dakota, dataset and the
soon-to-be-released North Carolina dataset* that Helena Mitasova and
Markus Neteler are preparing.
[*] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.grass.user/18796

AFAIK these will be useful as QGIS sample data as well, as long as the
qgis-plugin-grass package is installed.

Has there been any resolution to The Great Debian Documentation License
Debate, and if so how does this affect geo-data? ie what is an
acceptable data license and what debian-legal post-debate guidance can
we provide to Helena & Markus as they get ready to release?


Proposed package names: "grass-data-spearfish" is easy; the
grass-data-nc [county name?] would probably need to be split into
several packages as, e.g., the satellite imagery may be large.

FYI, other FOSS community & Free geodata projects:
  http://publicgeodata.org  &  http://www.osgeo.org/geodata


thanks,
Hamish