[Freegis-list] ECW

[Jason Fillman]

On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:55, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> Paul,
> 
> I've rechecked the license of the ER mapper SDKs in one case.
> Downloading the ECWSDK245_Solaris.tar.gz
> I've learned that it does not come with full source code
> and the license.txt does not grant the freedoms to use, study,
> adapt, copy and publish the software. E.g.:
> 
> 	For conditions, requirements and fees associated 
> 	with redistribution, installation or use in "Server Products" or
> 	"SDK Products" contact Earth Resource Mapping.
> 
> It is non-free software coming with a restricted gratis license.
> I suspect the other ER mapper downloads to also be proprietory.
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html
> 	Bernhard

Hmm, that's rather annoying. Not to be "sneaky", but how hard would it
be to reverse engineer the format? Of course I'd rather use open
formats, but since the data I require is from a state agency that has
standardized on ER Mapper files, it seems I have little choice. Other
projects like SAMBA have managed to implement others' proprietary
formats in open source w/o getting into trouble.... and it seems to me
that if you provide source that can be downloaded for free, you can't
really enforce any license that says no one can study the code and make
their own implementation, as long as no original code is used. But I'm
no legal specialist.

In the immediate future, there may be one simple solution for my
situation. The agency in mind does offer downloadable data in MrSid
format. Another somewhat proprietary format, but at least there are
readers avaiable to the user at no cost. 

The issue is that I want to make this data easily presentable to the
people at my place of work who need it. I'm fairly new to this sort of
data, so maybe someone here could help me out. I'd like to make some
sort of overview of the county in question that will allow the user to
click on an area and have the viewer load the correct MrSid quad. Is
this possible?

Thanks for all the help,
Jason

-- 
Jason Fillman
Ranger Services Inc.		http://www.rangerserv.com
Office:				(956) 585-1962
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