[Freegis-list] OGDI 3.1alpha2 Source Released

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 04:46:49PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> The 3i (Information Interoperability Institute) is pleased to 
> announce the first 3i source release for OGDI.  OGDI is the
> Open Geographic Datastore Interface, an application programming
> interface (API) providing local and remote access to geospatial 
> data products in a variety of raster and vector formats.  
> 
> The open source OGDI core technology, and the OGDI interface standard
> is currently maintained by the 3i. 

>   http://ogdi.sourceforge.net/

I skimmed through the diverse licenses involved in OGDI
(which are nicely collected in the License file) and
detected at least one license which is not Free Software
(though the source is open, which again is a different thing
to Open Source, alas, this term has produce a lot confusion):

include/win32/heapagnt.h (and others):
/* heapagnt.h -- HeapAgent (tm) public C/C++ header file
 *
 * Copyright (C) 1991-1996 by Arthur D. Applegate.  All Rights Reserved.
 * All Rights Reserved.
 *
 * No part of this source code may be copied, modified or reproduced
 * in any form without retaining the above copyright notice.
 * This source code, or source code derived from it, may not be redistributed
 * without express written permission of the author.

Thus we will not add OGDI to FreeGIS, because redistributing
the code in some cases can be an illegal act.

OGDI is a _very_ interesting tool and it is __almost__ Free Software.
To my mind it is worth the efford to resolve the remaining (hopefully
only few) license issues.

BTW, does SourceForge allow to place non-free Software outside their
nonfree section? Just a thought that comes to my mind.

Frank, can you perhaps estimate the work that needs to be done for
resolving the license issues? I can offer assitance in writing to
authors.

However, the free GIS programmers of you have still the opportunity
to pick code from OGDI which is covered by Free Software licenses.
It looks like the most helpful code elements are all Free Software.

An option to add OGDI to FreeGIS would be to publish a package
without the non-free elements (yes, of course that package would not
be compilable).

Jan

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

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