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

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 02:02:48PM -0500, Thorsten Becker wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> obviously we have no means of enforcing any of the licensing restrictions.

As author you can take legal actions against anyone who voilates
your licensing terms. This is hard to do for military organisations
because they usually do have a special legal situation.

> we therefore leave it to the user to decide if his usage of igmt is
> ethically compliant with the license of igmt or not. as you might see on
> our user list, we have some military organizations on them. if these
> people use igmt for mapping their gardens in their spare time, we are
> happy with that. however, we prefer to express our personal ethical bias
> in the licensing.

If you did that as a recommendation would that be enough?

> > > 	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?

> 1.1.

This is not true as I do have a tarball for 1.2, which we used for
the FreeGIS CD rpms, which only has the GPL license included.

> > 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.
> > 
> 
> i interpret 'derived' as including gmt source or something like that which
> we don't. 

I wish it would be as simple as this, participating in several
discussions on gnu.misc.discuss I know that it is complicated.

iGMT is not useful without GMT and therefore creates a combined
product with it, I think that US legal interpretations consider the
combination as a product a derived work.

> i therefore consider it appropriate that igmt has it's own license. 

Maybe we have to ask for legal advice here.
	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)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 248 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/attachments/20010206/36b0e54f/attachment.bin