Today, NEOGEO’s involvement in the geomatics community is taking on a new dimension. By adopting the Affero GPL license for our OneGeo Suite and GeoContrib software, we aim to strengthen this commitment.
Why this change?
By adopting this new license, the objective is twofold:
1. Protect innovations: We want to ensure that the developments carried out by Neogeo and our clients remain free. This approach helps preserve the richness and added value of our work.
2. Share and collaborate : When an organization—whether from the geomatics world or not—decides to build on our work, its contributions will be accessible to the entire community. It is a virtuous circle: the more we collaborate, the more the software improves, for everyone’s benefit.
This change will take effect starting with OneGeo Suite version 1.1 and the GeoContrib 5.4 stable release.
The 4 freedoms of free software: an essential reminder
The concept of free software is based on 4 fundamental freedoms:
- The right to use the software without restriction
- The right to study the software
- The right to distribute the software
- The right to modify the software and distribute the modifications
Copyleft: In this respect, copyleft is a guarantee of equality and freedom, intended to prevent restrictions on users’ rights.
The software may be modified, but its license must remain compatible, while retaining, in particular, the right to copy the source code. Copyleft therefore ensures that free software remains free.
Free software licenses at a glance
There are currently several free software licenses:
- Apache: A permissive license that allows changing the license only for modified files.
- GPL: Probably the most popular free software license and the cornerstone of copyleft. It requires derived products and associated programs to adopt a compatible license, guaranteeing the same rights to users.
- LGPL: A variant of the GPL, the LGPL offers more flexibility for integrating code into a product under another license (even a non-free one) while remaining compatible with the GPL.
- Affero GPL: The main difference between the GPL and the AGPL lies in how they address the use of software on remote servers. The AGPL was created to ensure that web services based on free software provide remote users with access to the source code (even if they have not downloaded the software).
Licenses that are not so free
Other licenses are also available, but they are more restrictive in terms of freedoms:
- SSPL (Server Side Public License): used by MongoDB and ElasticSearch, this license limits making software available through cloud hosting providers. It primarily targets cloud giants such as AWS. Most users can continue to use MongoDB and ElasticSearch as before. This license is not recognized by the OSI (Open Source Initiative) as “open source”, and it is sometimes criticized for requirements considered excessive;
- Freemium (or shareware): software is free but most often not modifiable
- CLAs (Contributor License Agreements): Like an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), approval must be signed by contributors in order to assign their rights. This license also allows the company to use contributions in a way that would not be permitted by the open-source license under which the software is published (e.g., changing the license).
Moving our solutions to this new license reflects our desire to strengthen freedom, collaboration, and innovation in the field of geomatics. We also want this change to benefit the entire community, as well as the developments that will result from it.
Author: Sébastien DA ROCHA
