Re: [DebianGIS] cfitsio3 goes GPL in Debian, so what about GDAL?

[Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam@pobox.com>]

Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
> As explained in #422537 it includes files taken from gzip to support
> compression. Current maintainer decided to preserve compression support
> and so moved the license to GPL. Incidentally it is not compatible with
> GDAL copyright, so a practical possibility is disabling FITS support in GDAL.
> Another possibility would be re-licensing it as GPL in Debian, but it would imply
> licensing all its rdepends in the same way. Is there anyone who does not
> agree about that, due to constraints of one of its rdepends? Ideas? AFAIK
> licensing under the more 'restrictive' GPL is not a problem due to the 
> BSD-like nature of the upstream license.

Francesco,

My opinion is that the FITS format should be dropped from GDAL on Debian
if it's use would require a relicensing of GDAL which would then ripple
up the stack through other applications built on GDAL.

FITS is not an important format at all.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org