Re: contrib/postgis spatial extensions

Paul Ramsey <pramsey@refractions.net> writes:
> This is something which has been discussed on our list in the past. The
> main argument for BSD to date has been as you noted: to get eventual
> mainline pgsql inclusion. The main argument against, in my view, is that
> we want to be a place where open geomatics code can aggregate.

A fair point.  The BSD theory about this is that open source process
is enough better than closed source that you can achieve critical mass
anyway, but if you haven't seen that happen for yourself it's hard to
take on faith.

A possible compromise is to accept postgis as a contrib item under GPL
now, with the thought that someday (after you feel you've achieved
critical mass) you might relicense it as BSD so we can put it in the
mainline postgres code.  However that bothers me somewhat: your current
and near-future contributors might say that they contributed on the
understanding that the license is GPL, and they don't want their
contributions relicensed.  In practice it's awfully tough to change
the license of an established project without making people unhappy.
You're probably better off making your decision and sticking to it.

> We'll talk about this a bit on the list and see what the PostGIS users
> think.

Fair enough.  Thanks for listening.

            regards, tom lane