Basemap License

What is basemap’s license? setup.py says OSI Approved and PKG-INFO says UNKNOWN.

[QuLogic]

Specifically, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:MIT#Old_Style_with_legal_disclaimer_3

However, I think this should be made a bit more clear everywhere.

[WeatherGod]

A bit of additional history… I have had discussions with those who maintain GMT a few years ago about their license. The discussion centered around whether or not it was even valid to apply a software license to data files. Basically, my interpretation of the situation was that the GMT data files were potentially unlicensed and that they needed an open data license such as a creative commons license in order for them to really be properly protected.

Legal questions aside, as a practical matter, the authors of GMT were well aware of Basemap’s usage of their GSHHS data and they seemed perfectly fine with how basemap was being used and distributed. It also should be noted that the actual GSHHS data itself was never actually bundled with basemap. Rather, GMT was used to do an initial preprocessing of the original data, and then some python scripts in the codebase would extract out the needed information and store it into an easy-for-basemap-to-use form. So, because of these hoops the data had to jump through, I had serious doubts that a software license was even applicable.

On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 3:02 PM Víctor Molina García < @.***> wrote:

@ocefpaf https://github.com/ocefpaf The original license used to be the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND https://opensource.org/licenses/HPND) but in fact basemap was GPLv2+ as a whole because of the data files included from GMT 4.x.

I contacted recently @jswhit https://github.com/jswhit and he agreed with replacing the HPND into the more standard MIT license (whose text is almost identical). Also, the data files were updated in 2016 with the new GSHHG 2.3.6 plus GMT 5.x, whose license is now LGPLv3+, so actually the license in basemap was still enforcing GPLv2+ without being needed anymore.

I made a bit of rearranging in all these license files to make it clearer. For the next stable release (1.3.0, to be ready soon), the summary would be:

• basemap: MIT (with bundled libgeos_c.so under LGPLv2.1-only).
• basemap-data: LGPLv3+ (some files also under MIT).
• basemap-data-hires: LGPLv3+.

This also means that basemap will not cause a cascading of the GPLv2+ into derivative works from basemap1.3.0 onwards.

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