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Establishing dialog between the Debian project and OGC regarding Document & Software Notice terms



Hi Thorsten,

A recurring problem with geospatial software in the Free Software community and Debian in particular has been the terms of the OGC Document Notice and Software Notice licenses. The problematic OGC license terms were first discussed with you after the rejection of TinyOWS [0]. The discussion triggered by the rejection raised some issues [1] that to this day cannot be resolved because we've not been able to establish a dialog between the Debian FTP masters and OGC.

In February 2015 the problematic OGC licenses were discussed on the OSGeo standards list [2], because the PyCSW project and its packaging was affected by the same issues as TinyOWS [3]. OGC followed that discussion and wants "to do whatever possible to ensure that OGC licensing is not a hurdle".

OGC has provided George Percivall (CC'ed) as a contact point to discuss the OGC license terms, and I hope that you can fulfill this role on the Debian side as a representative of the FTP masters. If you are not willing or able to fulfill this role, do you have any suggestions who would be a good contact in Debian to discuss the licensing issues with people from OGC?

Scott Simmons (also CC'ed) informed me [4] that they never heard back from Debian when they tried to discuss this issue. Since I directed them to the general ftpmaster@ contact and that didn't work out, I'm now addressing you personally since you were the FTP master to reject these packages and involved in the follow-up discussion.

[0] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017300.html [1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-January/017321.html [2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-February/000834.html [3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-grass-devel/2014-November/024520.html [4] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/2015-November/000937.html

Kind Regards,

Bas


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