[Proj] Geo Transfoms and calculations

[Charles Karney]

Gerald I. Evenden wrote:
> 5.  What's a poor jerk like me supposed to do?  For example, on the
> geodetic program I am currently finishing up I want to put 'readline'
> on the front end for obvious reasons; BUT wait, that uses GPL.  Arrgh!
> I can hear the bitching and moaning now.  At the moment I have a
> simple procedure called 'readline' as a substitute but gee, is the
> name possible copyrighted too?

Is this really such a problem?  The MIT license is compatible with GPL.
So you can distribute MIT-licensed code which links against GPL
libraries.  The resulting executable is covered by the GPL but the
source remains under the MIT license.

A commercial entity which wants to incorporate your code into its
proprietary code will need to find a substitute for the GPL library, of
course.  Or, as you noted, you might provide a lame substitute yourself
(a dummy version of readline or simple-minded implementations of GSL
functions).

-- 
Charles Karney <ckarney at sarnoff.com>
Sarnoff Corporation, Princeton, NJ 08543-5300

URL: http://charles.karney.info
Tel: +1 609 734 2312
Fax: +1 609 734 2662