Re: PostGIS in a commercial project

I'm not a lawyer, cockroach, or hobbyist license enthusiast. Here's my
impression.

First, I'm sure this must come IP a lot. Have you looked for a PostGIS
licensing faq? Checked their mailing lists?

The issues with bundling MySQL were mostly around the GPL-licensed client
library, something that doesn't apply to Pg's bsd-licensed libpq. You don't,
AFAIK, need to link to any PostGIS client side library to use PostGIS, so
that shouldn't be an issue.

For the server side stuff you would certainly have to distribute any postgis
code changes, plus probably any server code changes since you're bundling
them with postgis. Your SQL and data would be no more affected than a
program is affected when compiled with the GPL-licensed gcc.

Personally I can't see any reason for concern. You'd have to distribute a
GPL notice and/or PostGIS sources with the product to customers, of course,
but that's not a biggie.

If you use something like a PostGIS extension to libpq / libpqtypes / etc
client side, and that is also GPL, that might be a problem.
On Oct 21, 2011 3:26 PM, "Thomas Kellerer" <spam_eater(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> we are using PostgreSQL in our projects and would like to integrate PostGIS
> as well.
>
> Now PostGIS is licensed under the GPL and I wonder if we can use it in a
> commercial (customer specific) project then.
> The source code will not be made open source, but of course the customer
> will get the source code.
>
> Is it still OK to use the GPL licensed PostGIS in this case?
> Is that then considered a derivative work because the application will not
> work without PostGIS?
>
> Regards
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
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