[Freegis-list] SPRING GIS software

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hallo Gilberto,

thanks for your clarifications about the status of SPRING 
and why it is not free software.


On Sat, Jan 20, 2001 at 03:48:45AM +0300, Gilberto Camara wrote:
> First, we are extremely supportive
> of the FreeGIS effort and free software
> in general. That said,
> why don´t we simply put SPRING on the
> web as source code? 

> As a starting point, there are legal
> problems which we haven´t been able
> to sort out. But these are not the only ones.

Can you be more specific on the problem?
Maybe someone can help or offer advice.

> Putting software on the web, on whatever
> form, implies an enormous responsibility
> on the part of the producer. 

I fail to see why publishing the source code would 
raise the level of responsibility of SPRING's producers.

> SPRING is a very large software product, with
> hundreds of functions, and 500.000+ lines of
> C++ code, 

> Making SPRING available as open source on the web 
> would require a major effort by our team in terms 
> of documentation, and further effort in terms of supporting 
> fellow code developers. These commitments are 
> outside of our current capacity.

If the current product is working, I do not see why
you should be ashame of your source code or the documentation.
On the other hand, if you publish the source code,
maybe other developers will join and help.
There is no guarentee for it of course.


> Therefore, SPRING-product has, for us, 
> a much higher priority that SPRING-open source.
> I hope you appreciate the difference.

With the bottleneck of your development team and the lack 
of software freedom, I can see that SPRING might have 
an unnecessary hard time in the future.

> Taking everything into account, we have taken the
> option of using our experience with SPRING to design
> a product that´s meant to be open source. That 
> product is called TERRALIB, whose first version will
> be made available on-line sometime in 2001. 

Great!
Is the development process open to review 
as with a lot of free software projects?

Best,
	Bernhard 

-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  
The FreeGIS Project                                         (freegis.org)
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