Re: PostGIS in a commercial project

On 24 Říjen 2011, 19:44, Thomas Kellerer wrote:
> Pavel Stehule wrote on 24.10.2011 12:19:
>> there is not clean who is customer and what is one unit. If you
>> distribute PostGIS inside your application as one unit to customer,
>> then your application should to use GPL.
>
> So if we only distribute our application and require the customer to
> install Postgres and PostGIS, then it shold be fine?

I think you should actually read GPL license, because you're obviously
confused by how it works - especially note the notion of "derived work".

Derived work means that you take a GPL licensed software and modify it. In
this case you're required to distribute the source code (again under GPL)
to those who received the binary (legally). In case of PostGIS this would
mean you modify the PostGIS source code itself, which is very unlikely I
guess.

Also note that you're not required to provide the sources to whoever asks,
only to those who received the binary from you. If someone "steals" the
software or receives the software from someone else, you're safe.

Anyway if you're going just to use PostGIS (without modifying it), neither
of the previous requirements of the concern as your application does not
need to be a GPL licensed.

Tomas