Intellectual Property vs Copyright

In the past I have often used the terms Intellectual Property and Copyright to mean essentially the same thing, without realizing that this was incorrect. Maybe that was because English is not my native language, but probably not since I have actually heard several others making the same mistake as well.

This morning in a discussion on this topic on the OSGeo Incubator mailing list, Frank Warmerdam explained the difference between the two terms and now I better understand why the terms Intellectual Property and Copyright should not be confused, especially in the context of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

I thought I'd share a copy of Frank's great explanation here in case it helps others better understand the distinction:

Daniel,

I believe the rationale behind avoiding the term Intellectual Property
has two parts.

First, it attempts to conflate a variety of very different legal mechanisms.
Primarily copyright, patents and trademarks.  Giving them all one name makes
it harder to separate out things we might agree with (copyright) from things
we might not (ie. Patents).

Second, it expresses these legal mechanisms in a manner that implies that
they are some sort of fundamental or manifest right rather than limited
government granted monopolies intended to serve specific needs of society

[...]

You can read the full email and the rest of the thread here.

Time to Register for the February 2012 OSGeo Code Sprint

The 2012 OSGeo Code Sprint is approaching fast: February 5-9, 2012 at IslandWood (near Seattle). I will be there to work on MapServer and am already looking forward to spending some quality time there with other OSGeo developers and contributors.

Please don't wait and register now! Space is limited, and early registrations also help with the planning of the event. You will have a unique chance to work with others on your OSGeo projects and to interact with key developers from other projects. All in the woods on a small island in the Puget Sound.

If you've been to one of the previous editions in Toronto (2009), New-York (2010) and/or Montreal (2011) then you already know how productive those meetings are, if not then I invite you to read my summary of the 2011 Montreal Code Sprint.

For more information or to register please visit the wiki page, or email our host, Michael Gerlek, directly at mpg@flaxen.com.

I signed up already. Have you?

The Mapgears team is growing!

(Version Française)

I am very excited to welcome Jessica Lapointe and Vincent Foley who just joined the Mapgears team in the last few weeks. This influx of new blood aims at increasing our ability to respond to the growing demand for MapServer and related open source technologies of course, but for Mapgears, this is also (and mostly) an investment to insure that we can continue to innovate and revolutionize the field of mobile and web mapping for years to come.

Jessica is an entrepreneur. Despite her young age, she already shines at the international level (just like Mapgears!) with her font production business: CuttyFruty.com. She developed her interest for font sets when she was 13, and today, her fonts are being used by big names such as Lise Wathier, Barbie, Microsoft and Rihanna. (Read more here.)

Even if her first start-up was very artsy, Jessica also has a passion for software and web development, and she actually won some prizes in that field. She is in the process of completing a bachelor's degree in computer science, and it is as a software developer that she joins our team. I am already looking forward to what her exceptional combination of artistic and programming skills will bring to the web mapping world.

With respect to Vincent, he combines experience in web development with a solid knowledge of Linux and the set of software development tools used by MapServer and several other OSGeo technologies. As part of our team, he will be working at the lower level of the architecture on the server side, the less visible, but no less critical part of the web mapping stack.

The users of Ubuntu GIS will have a chance to appreciate his contributions fairly soon as he is currently working with Alan to port the OSGeo UbuntuGIS packages to Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric). Stay tuned!

Welcome once again to our two solid recruits!

L'équipe de Mapgears s'agrandit !

(English Version)

J'ai le plaisir de souhaiter la bienvenue à Jessica Lapointe et Vincent Foley qui se sont joint à l'équipe de Mapgears au cours des dernières semaines. Cet apport de sang neuf vise bien entendu à répondre à la demande croissante pour les technologies open source de la famille de MapServer, mais il s'agit aussi et surtout d'un investissement visant à nous permettre de continuer à innover et révolutionner le monde de la cartographie Web et mobile dans les années à venir.

Jessica est une entrepreneure: malgré son jeune âge, elle rayonne déjà à l'échelle internationale (tout à fait à l'image de Mapgears!) avec son entreprise de production de polices de caractères CuttyFruty.com. Elle a commencé à s'intéresser à ce domaine alors qu'elle avait 13 ans, et aujourd'hui ses polices de caractères sont utilisées par des grands noms tels Lise Wathier, Barbie, Microsoft et Rihanna. (Voir ici et ici.)

Mais malgré le style artistique de son premier start-up, Jessica est aussi passionnée du monde du développement logiciel et du Web, et elle a d'ailleurs remporté des concours dans ce domaine. Elle est en train de compléter ses études en informatique à l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi et c'est à titre de développeure qu'elle joint notre équipe. J'ai déjà hâte de voir ce que cette combinaison exceptionnelle d'aptitudes artistiques et informatiques va apporter au monde de la cartographie.

Pour ce qui est de Vincent, il combine une expérience en développement Web à de solides connaissances des serveurs Linux et des outils de développement utilisés par MapServer et les autres technologies OSGeo. Il sera donc appelé à oeuvrer dans le domaine du développement bas niveau du côté serveur au sein de notre équipe, la partie moins visible, mais non moins critique du monde de la cartographie Web.

Les utilisateurs d'Ubuntu GIS auront la chance d'apprécier les contributions de Vincent très bientôt puisqu'il travaille présentement avec Alan à porter les "packages" OSGeo d'UbuntuGIS vers Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric).

Bienvenue encore une fois à nos deux solides recrues!

Retour sur la semaine de la géomatique à Montréal

La semaine dernière, j'ai eu la chance de participer à ce que nous avons baptisé la semaine de la géomatique à Montréal.

Le centre de gravité de la semaine était évidemment le congrès Géomatique 2011 qui avait lieu les mercredi et jeudi 12-13 octobre. Un WhereCamp et un 5 à 7 sont venus se greffer en marge de l'événement le mardi 11 octobre pour compléter le tout.

WhereCamp Montréal

La semaine s'est ouverte avec le WhereCamp Montréal du mardi 11 octobre à la maison Notman. Entre 20 et 30 participants sont venus échanger dans une embiance de BarCamp sur les thèmes de l'heure, incluant entre autres: géomatique et mobilité, "geek" vs géomaticien, données ouvertes, open source, et quelques autres que j'oublie.

Merci à Luc Vaillancourt et Sylvain Carle pour l'organisation et l'animation, et à la Maison Notman pour l'accueil.

5 à 7 OSGeo / ACSG

Les discussions se sont poursuivies lors d'un 5 à 7 commandité par OSGeo-Québec et l'ACSG Montréal. En plus des participants du WhereCamp, un certain nombre de participants de Géomatique 2011 se sont joints au groupe.

Géomatique 2011

Finalement, le plat de résistance fut Géomatique 2011 qui fêtait son 30ème anniversaire avec un programme de conférences et un salon d'exposants bien remplis. Une couverture plus complète de l'événement est disponible sur les sites de Baliz Media et Slashgeo, les partenaires média de l'événement.

Comme à l'habitude dans ce genre d'événements, pour moi ce sont les discussions et rencontres avec tout un réseau de collaborateurs, partenaires et clients existants ou potentiels qui sont les plus importantes. Une chance unique de discuter d'idées, de technologies et de projets autour du monde géospatial qui me passionne depuis maintenant 17 ans. Ce fut un plaisir de vous revoir tous!

J'en reviens évidemment la tête pleine d'idées et il me reste maintenant à trouver le temps pour en concrétiser au moins quelques unes. Au travail!

Obligations related to open source software licenses

A question that I hear often is whether open source software can be used in a proprietary (closed source) application. The answer is "it depends": it depends on the license of the open source components that you use and how the components are being used in your application.

This question came up again today on the gdal-dev discussion list, and Even Rouault posted an answer that summarizes very well the obligations related to the most common licenses in our field: GPL, LGPL, BSD and MIT/X11.

I reproduce Even's answer here for reference as a starting point for next time someone asks:

... here's my understanding of the obligations of the licences. Take it with a
grain of salt : "I'm not a lawyer".

* If your application links to a GPL library, the whole application, including
your own code, is bound by the GPL. You must include the appropriate copyright
notice for the library and provide the user access to the source code of the GPL
library (including the modifications you may have done) and to the code of your
application too under the terms of the GPL.

* If your application links to a LGPL library, you must include the appropriate
copyright notice for the library and provide the user access to the source code
of the LGPL library (including the modifications you may have done in it). Your
application itself may be released under the terms you like.

* If your application links to a BSD library, well, that's depend of the BSD
licence. There are 2-clause, 3-clause and 4-clause variants of the BSD
licence... If it includes the following clause "Redistributions in binary form
must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with
the distribution", well just comply with it. Otherwise, if you don't distribute
any source code (and you don't have to), you have nothing to do. In any case,
the licence only covers the library code, not your application.

* The MIT licence is a bit similar, except that, the general understanding is
that it places no obligations if you distribute the library as a binary object.
But I've always found that the term "the Software" in the licence isn't very
explicit if it only covers only the source code or binaries generated from it.
So it might be nice to include the copyright notice somewhere if you distribute
it as a binary. If you distribute it as source code, it's clear that you must
include the copyright notice.

News from the Montreal OSGeo Code Sprint

This week, Montreal was the host of OSGeo's 2011 Code Sprint where 29 OSGeo project developers and contributors from North America and Europe spent four intensive days working and meeting face to face for the advancement of their respective projects.

This year's sprint included teams working on the following projects: MapServer, GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, libLAS, ZOO Project, TinyOWS and GeoPrisma. In addition to the actual coding and project meetings, those sprints provide a unique way to build and maintain synergies between the projects and their developers.

On the MapServer front, the focus was on the 6.0 release. MapServer 6.0.0-beta2 should be released later this afternoon with the outcome of the sprint work.

Ruby bindings for MapServer and GDAL were brought back into maintenance, and some enhancements were made to the Oracle (OCI) driver in OGR.

The LibLAS group has been planning and setting up the bases of the new libPC (PC for Point Cloud), which will provide a generic interface to point cloud data formats. Think of libPC as the GDAL of point clouds.

The PostGIS team moved closer to the PostGIS 2.0 release with core changes to indexes, better support for raster map algebra, and several tickets closed on shp2pgsql.

The ZOO Project team worked on a new WPS service for athmospheric dispersion to simulate the dispersion of the cloud that spreads from the Japanese nuclear power plants. The team also made some good progress (testing and docs) towards the upcoming ZOO 1.2 release.

A MapServer mapfile parser has been added to TinyOWS to directly read the layer configuration information from a MapServer mapfile. This addition will significantly facilitate the use of TinyOWS as a WFS-T to complement MapServer. 

The GeoPrisma team got together to add support for two new service types (OGC WFS and WPS), as well as fixes to the print widget and some general security issues. They also started to build demos integrating the latest version of most projects present at the sprint including: MapServer, TinyOWS (with mapfile support), GeoPrisma, Zoo-Project and WKTRaster. Stay tuned to see this demo in action (link not available yet).

And of course there was the social side of the program, with a hockey night on Thursday, and hours of talk and lots of new ideas exchanged informally during the social events each night. 

Part of the group also went for a hike to the top of Mont-Royal to enjoy the view from the top of Montreal Island:

Once again, thank you to our sponsors and to our host for making this event possible, and to all the participants who made this a success.

Finally, there are already talks about the 2012 Code Sprint which is likely going to take place in Seattle (see here).

P.S. More pictures from the sprint are available on flickr.