[Freegis-list] just free

[Guy Edwards]

On Wed, 2005-01-05 at 16:44, Jack Varga wrote:
[snip]
> Now, a question.  Does anyone know of efforts to develop a DWG
> library that is compatible with GPL, LGPL or a similar license?
> The Open Design Group's OpenDWG library (a misnomer in its own
> right), is seriously problematic in regards to licensing.

You might want to see what the PythodCAD guys are up to, last year they
had an experimental GPL DWG library of some sort running which was fun
to help test but I've not been following it since. I think it's Art Haas
who is the main developer.

As someone who was flamed a long time back for posting an at-the time
incorrectly licensed project it wasn't necessary a bad thing in
hindsight. It made me actually _read_ the licenses properly and study
them and see where we (as a project) were at much greater risk than we
realised from the ways we were trying to distribute our project linked
to the closed source libraries it depended on. It made me realise it
actually was a big issue and not a minor one, and the guys who flamed
were quite human and approachable when you emailed them off list and
said you wanted to try and fix the situation.

At the same time we were talking to someone from Autodesk who wanted to
know if we were going to use their DWF library. I was in the habit of
actual reading licenses now and the license was a nightmare but we tried
to explain it to them and they said they'd see what they could do. A
year later and the latest DWF toolkit was under an almost open source
license. I hear it's not perfect but it was pretty close (better than
the OpenDWG people by a mile) version 6 is the good one, 5.5 is the old
one.
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=3148996 
So even the big companies will listen if you explain your case and I'm
not anyone even slightly important.

As a bit of a coincidence, it was the OpenDWG libraries we used and
OpenDWG changed them and now I don't think the lead developer would mind
if I said the projects dead (it would have meant a complete re-write
apparently). yes you can still download the old libraries if you
download a form, fill it out, sign it and post it to OpenDWG and wait
for their approval but you cant redistribute the library and you can't
modify it even if you wanted to. If it were truly "free" then things
would be different.

I used to think the "hard-liners" were a bit harsh, but I've come to see
them as rather important. The flame didn't scar me for life and people
are passionate about what they believe in, I quite like it that way.  

Guy