[Freegis-list] Re: [Fwd: iGMT licensing]

[Bernhard Reiter]

Thorsten,

thanks for sharing iGMT with us.
Let me again say that it is not my attention to question your
intention in licensing iGMT in the way it is. 

I am just trying to explain it a bit, why I think that a different
license might even be more useful. Feel of course free to disagree.


On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 10:01:38AM -0500, Thorsten Becker wrote:
> 	thanks for your remarks about iGMT. We appreciate your interest
> and are happy that you like our software. Please let me reply to your
> comments by quoting below. 

> > From bernhard at intevation.de Thu Feb  1 09:46:22 2001
> > From: Bernhard Reiter <bernhard at intevation.de>
> > Subject: iGMT licensing

> > * You have changed the licence from GPL to GPL with an addition
> >   which reads as following:
> > 
> > | In addition, iGMT is not to be used for any military purposes or for
> > | any other activities that are against the spirit as expressed in the
> > | Student Pugwash Pledge (www.spusa.org/pugwash/pledge.html). 
> > 
> > I am a bit worried, because this renders iGMT non-free software
> > to be strict.  I agree with your political goals stated in the
> > Pledge, but freedom of software cannot depend on much more
> > political strings than its freedom. 

> > It would be sad if igmt is not free software anymore, because we
> > (people interested in free gis software) will have to work with the
> > latest version which came with a free software license and could not
> > profit of your good scientific work.

> 	We regret that we deviate from the FSF policy in that respect.

It is not only the FSF's idea, but also the same idea from the Debian
social contract and the Open Source Initiative'S view upon what Free
Software is. So there is a broad consensus about when Software can
be called free. 

Personally I think that the freedom of software is helping peace as
it brings power of the computer to the masses, which includes
development countries and other people which cannot affort high
priced proprietory software.

> Even though we can appreciate the reasoning behind it, we simply do not
> want our software to be used for general military and other purposes we do
> not support. The G in iGMT is for doGmatic. 

Thinking a lot about this, I cannot see how this restriction can be
useful in practice. The distinction between military purposes and
purposes you allow is not sharp. A lot of research is done which
ultimatly leads to military use. You also will not be able to really
enforce these restrictions in reality. Another question about
military purposes being morally good or bad is a matter of the situation.
There are situations were you also will agree that military force is
needed.

I might add a small story here. The Forein Minister of Germany
Joschka Fischer is a member of the green party which is known be
pacifistic. In the Kosowo crisis he was caught in a conflict between
agreeing to military actions or oppose them. It was a hard decision
as if you buy into the view that some slaugthering of a ethic
minority was going than not taking action would be a military
decision to tolerate this.


> 	If you are concerned by our deviation from the GPL, I suppose you
> will have to take iGMT off your next release of the free GIS disc. 

We will use the latest version which was Free Software, 
if we have to other choice. :(
Do you know which was the last one you have published under GPL?

> You might want to include a link to our newest version, however,
> to inform users about the availability of a restricted license
> version.

Coming to think of it there might be a problem with the restricted
license for you, too:
iGMT is completly dependant on GMT and GMT is released under GPL. 
Based on the legal interpretation on what a derived work is,
iGMT might be a derived work and therefore you would not be able to
legally use iGMT with GMT under a non GPL-compatible license.

Regards,
	Bernhard
-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  
The FreeGIS Project                                         (freegis.org)
Association for a Free Informational Infrastructure            (ffii.org)
FSF Europe                                            	  (fsfeurope.org)
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