[Freegis-list] free dwf?

[Eric Wilhelm]

# The following was supposedly scribed by
# Paolo Cavallini
# on Sunday 10 July 2005 08:52 am:

>Does anybody know about this news? Seems encouraging, even though the
> licence is probably the usual puzzle.

It's actually a very liberal license.  I guess you could say it is close 
to MIT/BSD/Apache, etc.  You get to use, modify, and redistribute it in 
open or proprietary apps as source or binary, etc.  So, there's not any 
chance of them "taking their ball and going home" after you get 
started.

One item of note is "provide autodesk with your modifications" (and 
detailed notes about the mods?), which is probably different than the 
usual "make your modifications available" that goes with most OSI 
licenses.  There's also restrictions on how you represent your software 
(cannot use their name or trademarks, etc) but we're used to that.

The clause about "confidential information" seems out-of-place since you 
have just been granted the right to redistribute said info.

DISCLAIMER:  I'm not a lawyer, please have yours read the license.

As for the library itself, I've been thinking about using it in the 
uber-converter project, but the usual time-or-money constraints apply.  
If anyone is interested, I'd like to know how much the GIS community 
uses DWF or if anyone would be interested in contributing a connector.  
Feel free to contact me or discuss on the list.

--Eric
-- 
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
--Albert Einstein
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