License issue for all GIS related packages. [call for help]

[Balint Cristian]

Hello folks,
   
   All GIS packages (from fedora-extras now fedora) suffer a missing of geodetic
constants
sets from www.epsg.org (very important for GIS otherwise) becouse of license issues. I 
personaly tried to add some packages to fedora and maintain those,  but basicly some of
tham 
are pure repack of tarballs and removal of some doubted piece of code. I am a GIS fan, i
tryed my 
very best to shape and polish up all GIS related packages and its related libs: ogdi,
gdal, grass, 
mapserver, but without geodetic constants is like in math trigonometry without PI constant
...
  Its very frustrating that tons of GIS code depends on a simple collection of
'constants' like PI
one from math, in a simple excel like file  ...

  The problem, more exactly, is with this dataset aviable at: http://www.epsg.org, (the
organisation 
who collected datasets and made them aviable), under EPSG Version 6.12 Online
Documentation 
there is an 'Use of data' section with the license, you can follow it to read.

The hurting license text is:
3. The data may not be distributed for profit by any third party;

  After some mail excenge between OSSgeo (http://www.ossgeo.org) chairman who is olso
very
interested as open source party of GIS, me and other folks, EPSG proposed a draft and
called OSgeo
to review it. Fortunatley OSgeo has no lawyer they kindly pass this away with the reason
that they 
are not lawyers too :) and the whole thing remain stalled. 
   I would like if someone look into attached proposal from OSgeo, and  if its OK i would
like to invite him 
to help me out in a possible discuss with Roger Lott (chairman of EPSG) as per a good law
technical one.

   I attach the new version of license draft proposed by EPSG itself, a preliminary
verdict that validate 
its usability for open source scope would be fine , before start to talk with EPSG ...



BTW,

   There is extremly nice and powerfull GIS software, like  http://grass.itc.it/ wich can
easy compete
GIS software giant: http://www.esri.com.


This would be great if happen :)

/christian