Re: PostGIS in a commercial project

On 10/25/11 3:51 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
> As Robert has suggested, you have misunderstood the GPL license - if
> you make changes to the *PostGIS* source code AND you distribute the
> modified code to your customer (rather than offering a managed
> service), you would need to make the changes available to your
> *customer* upon request but there is no obligation to make them
> available to anyone else. But then if your application connects
> remotely to the PostgreSQL server then your application isn't linking
> directly to the PostGIS libraries, so then this becomes a non-issue
> anyway.
>
> I guess strictly speaking you could call using stored procedures with
> PostGIS functions a GPL "violation", but I don't believe anyone
> associated with the project would have a problem with this. The aim of
> the GPL license for PostGIS was to ensure that code was contributed
> back to the project core, not because we want to claim ownership on
> everyone's GIS application code.
>
> If you have any further questions related to licensing, we would be
> glad to discuss this further on the postgis-users mailing list.

as I read the GPL, if he's distributing his software bundled on a
turnkey computer with linux(GPL) and PostGIS(GPL) then the GPL license
wants to encompass the whole package, and he has to make FULL source
code available to his customers, who can freely redistribute said source
any way they want. the reality is, this is rather unenforcable.

if he's distributing his application software separately, and the user
has to install linux and postgis etc and integrate his application, then
this doesn't apply at all.

--
john r pierce N 37, W 122
santa cruz ca mid-left coast