Re: PostGIS in a commercial project

Mark Cave-Ayland, 25.10.2011 12:51:
> 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.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation.

I always have a hard time to understand the GPL especially the dividing line between "using", "linkin" and creating a derived work.

Kind regards
Thomas