[From nobody Thu Jun  7 16:10:55 2018

Might be interesting for people here.
The Lesser GPL protects the long-term freedom less,
but raises the chances of wide spread use of the library.
	Bernhard


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From: James Macgill <J.Macgill@geog.leeds.ac.uk>
Subject: Proposed licence change for GeoTools Java GIS toolkit
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The open source java toolkit for interactive web based mapping 
applications, GeoTools, has been available for a number of years under 
the GPL licence. 

Folowing increasing interest from the commercial sector and a drive for 
more interoperability with other packages it has been sugested that the 
toolkit change to the less restrictive LGPL which would allow GeoTools 
to be used as a library by other applications regardless of their licence.

The commercial sector have access to profesional full time developers 
who could add considerably to the development of GeoTools, under the 
LGPL their new code would still be open source only the application 
specific code for their projects would remain closed.  I would like to 
see the widest possible use and development of the toolkit, hense the 
sugested move to LGPL.

I am the pricipal author of GeoTools an I am keen to see the switch 
made, however a number of people have contributed code over the years, 
meny from this newsgroup.  I am no longer in contact with many of them 
so I am posting public messages, such as this one, to see if any past 
contributors have any strong objections to the licence change before it 
takes place.

More details of the toolkit can be found at : http://geotools.sf.net

Many thanks
James

-- 
-- 
James Macgill
Centre for Computational Geography
Spell Checker (c) Creative spelling inc. (AKA my dyslexic brain)
http://geotools.sf.net (client side java mapping toolkit)



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