[Freegis-list] free dwf?

[Allan Doyle]

On Jul 10, 2005, at 15:52, Eric Wilhelm wrote:

> # 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.

I have not read the Autodesk license, but this sounds like the same  
thing the BBN legal people made us do with the OpenMap license. The  
issue they could not figure out was how to be sure that they would  
receive notice of mods people made. Assume developer X makes some  
mods and releases them. The question is, how would BBN be sure to  
find the mods made by X if they just randomly show up on the net. The  
answer, to them was, make X also provide the mods back to BBN, thus  
ensuring they are informed. I think in general, for most FOSS  
projects, X would make the mods known to the originators since  
otherwise the mods themselves are less likely to get back into the  
main release tree.

     Allan


>
> 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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-- 
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org