The GRASS Geographical Information System

Posted Feb 18, 2005 18:42 UTC (Fri) by ber (subscriber, #2142)
In reply to: The GRASS Geographical Information System by Klavs
Parent article: The GRASS Geographical Information System

I am glad that the Americans have had such a good "mind for sharing", so the state's development projects, more than once, has been done under the GPL license.

Originally they did not use the GNU GPL. The U.S.A. have a long standing tradition to have information that were aquired with federal money to be put in the public domain. Public domain is only possible in some part of the world and means: Nobody is the author and there is no copyright protection.

US CERL published GRASS as public domain, later the development team (under the lead of Markus Neteler, Hannover, Germany as that time) used their contributions to claim copyright again and license the GRASS version under the GNU GPL clearing up a long standing license confusion making GRASS clearly Free Software.