Re: contrib/postgis spatial extensions

This is something which has been discussed on our list in the past. The
main argument for BSD to date has been as you noted: to get eventual
mainline pgsql inclusion. The main argument against, in my view, is that
we want to be a place where open geomatics code can aggregate. At the
moment, most geospatial algorithms are only available under commercial
licencing regimes: until we get a critical mass of open projects and
workable code, inertia will continue to point us towards closed source
and development.

We'll talk about this a bit on the list and see what the PostGIS users
think.

Tom Lane wrote:
>
> I'm for adding this to contrib, but is there any chance of getting it
> released under our BSD-style license, not GPL? If it's GPL then it
> will never be a candidate to move out of contrib and into the main tree,
> which seems like something we'd like to do with it eventually. The GPL
> license forbids us from merging GPL'd code into BSD-licensed code,
> so the best we can do with GPL'd code is keep it at arm's length in
> the contrib area.
>
> regards, tom lane

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| Paul Ramsey
| Refractions Research
| Email: pramsey(at)refractions(dot)net
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