[Freegis-list] Re: Freegis-list Digest, Vol 3, Issue 5

[Bernhard Reiter]

Dear Gilberto,

first let me thank you for your answer.
It is appreciated that you and INPE care for the Free Software community.

Your clarification showed that the situation has improved.
Unfortunately the situation is still not as clear as I hoped it would be.

Please understand my remarks in that matter as constructive criticism.
They shall help you to remove the last obstacles to release
TerraView as Free Software without doubts which will benefit everybody.
It seems that only some details will need to be improved.

There is no doubt about INPE's good will or trustworthiness.


On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 10:09:43AM -0200, Gilberto Camara wrote:
> Please let me clarify the information on TerraView.
> Terraview is free software, and you get the source code
> for it when you download TerraLib. All TerraView programs are GPL.
> 
> Quoting a look at the http://www.terralib.org/download.php webpage:
> "It is important to know that we have,
> at this stage put all the code for the TerraLib 2.0 Library
> together with the source code for the TerraView 2.0 Application".

[..]

> Therefore, I would like to ask that you correct
> the status of  TerraView  in the GIS-L list.

In my first email I refered to our last conversation 
about TerraView's (as opposed to Terralib's) status in March 2003
and some of my questions were left open then.

Up to now the situation has improved 
which I learned just now from your email:
It is documented in English how to get the source code for TerraView.

So I am starting to examine:
c88ed3a9dcb5613b00ca8102d6389744  terralib20.tar.gz  size: 3167635 

Result:
I have not found a licensing statment about terraview in the archive.

Also the licensing statement of terralib itself is missing in the archive.
There is a public statement at
http://www.terralib.org/copyright.html
stating that the license of Terralib is GNU LGPL v2.1. 
TerraView is _not_ mentioned on that page.
Thus there are only two public statments about TerraView known to me
which you have done in public emails lists.
This would not be enough to be sure that Terraview is Free Software.

To remove any doubts I suggest adding a statement to the readme file
of the mentioned archive that all parts copyright by INPE are 
Free Software released under GNU LGPL >=v2.1. Also add a copy of the LGPL.
Mention that the archive also contains third party software
with other license holders and license conditions.

I also recommend adding the permission to distribute the files
in terralib/drivers/OracleSpatial/ and subdirectories
which carry an Oracle copyright notice.

I hope that my hints can be helpfull to improve the TerraView distribution
making sure that everybody that downloads the archive 
can read that it is Free Software.

Regards,
	Bernhard

> Message: 4 Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:29:25 +0200 From: Bernhard Reiter 
> <bernhard at intevation.de> Subject: Re: [Freegis-list] Is there a GIS that 
> query directly MySQL for data ? To: freegis-list at intevation.de 
> Message-ID: <20031024092925.GG26129 at intevation.de> Content-Type: 
> text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 11:40:15AM -0200, 
> Eduardo Patto Kanegae wrote:
> 
> >>I'm not sure about your needs, but take a look at TerraLib and TerraView 
> >>( http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terralib/ and http://www.dpi.inpe.br/terraview/ )
> > 
> >
> 
> We do not know yet if TerraView is Free Software or not.
> This is why we cannot recommend it.
> 
> 
> There is a good chance that it is non-free,
> as nobody on this list could answer questions about the license
> or show the source code. 
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