[Freegis-list] iGMT licensing

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hello Alexander,
(I write in English, because you might want to send this mail to
Thorsten. And I also send a carbon copy to the freegis-list.)

Being with the FreeGIS.org project you might know me and I enjoy
IGMT a lot.

There are two issues which I noticed today:

* You might want to adopt a better version number scheme.
People are using your development versions for iGMT1.2, but the
source code archive is always called the same. This welcomes
confusion about the version used. The version on the freegis cd for
example is called 1.2, but it is probably less recent than your latest
development version. You could simply add the date to your snapshot,
so call the latest development version igmt_v1.2-20002710.tar.gz 
or igmt_v1.2pre2.tar.gz or something.

* 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. 

Here are the commonly accepted guidelines for free software,
which you are violating with the new igmt license:

	http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
| 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.
| 
|       The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the
| program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not
| restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being
| used for genetic research. 

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

| * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). 


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.

Best,
	Bernhard

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