[Freegis-list] Martin Reddy's Open Source Projects

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 05:12:55PM -0700, Martin Reddy wrote:
> Thanks for adding our code to the freegis.org site - this is really great. I
> will follow up to the GeoVRML mailing list and point those people over here.
> This might encourage a few people to talk who didn't know about each other
> before.

thats the idea :-)

> > >dd I can't connect to tsmapi.com too, but I thought it could be some local
> > > routing problem here, since I can't access a lot of sites in USA. I found
> > > an addrees which can be an alias to the site:
> > > http://www.ai.sri.com/tsmApi/ (it worked).
> >
> > I have added tsmApi to FreeGIS with the latter URL.
> 
> Our server was down a couple of times over the weekend so this may be the
> cause of your connection problems. Certainly, www.tsmapi.com is up at the
> moment and this is the preferred name of the site.

I have changed the URL accordingly.

> On the GeoTransform front, it is listed as non-free. I don't think that this
> is strictly true.

As you are new to FreeGIS I should mention that we use the term
free software strictky in the way FSF, FSFE use them.

> Certainly, we would like to have this code released under
> something like the Apache license and just be done. However, as the code is
> based upon algorithms used by SEDRIS, we are tied to their license. The
> SEDRIS guys believe that their license is essentially open, the only
> restriction is that you cannot turn around and sell it for profit.

that is again one example where you can see that 'open source', though
the term was invented with essentially the same definition as for
free software, it is often misinterpreted as somthing like 'you can see
the code and to some degree use it'.

> I therefore think that a more correct description would be "free for non-
> commercial purposes".

I am too strictly focused on freedom to use this term ;-)

> A better long-term option would be to put more pressure
> on the SEDRIS guys to let us change the license to Apache (or some such).

very good idea! Do they really expect that other companies make money
with the unmodified code? 
Anyone out there volunteering to contact SEDRIS about this issue?

Another long-term option would be to implement a free replacement.
That would mean a lot work. We should first try the option above.

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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