Opened 16 years ago

Closed 6 years ago

Last modified 6 years ago

#2163 closed defect (fixed)

gdal/data/esri_extra.wkt right cloudy

Reported by: warmerdam Owned by: warmerdam
Priority: normal Milestone: 2.3.0
Component: License Version: unspecified
Severity: normal Keywords: OGRSpatialReference
Cc: Markus Neteler, Lucian Plesea

Description

gdal/data/esri_extra.wkt: Derived with some processing from projections definitions in ArcGIS, rights unclear. It would be desirable to obtain permission from ESRI allowing distribution, or some sort of legal clarification indicating this sort of use of their definitions is acceptable under the law.

Change History (13)

comment:1 by Bas Couwenberg, 10 years ago

Due to the unclear licensing of this file, it's been excluded from the gdal Debian package. (Debian Bug#721343)

Has there been any contact with ESRI to resolve the unclear rights?

comment:2 by tomh, 8 years ago

It's excluded in Fedora for the same reason, with all sorts of knock on complications...

comment:3 by Markus Neteler, 7 years ago

Cc: Markus Neteler added

Are there any news here?

For example, the European Joint Research Centre (JRC) uses EPSG:54009 Mollweide as the official projection of their new "Global Human Settlement Layer" products:

http://ghsl.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ghs_pop.php

which would need the WKT entry:

54009,PROJCS["World_Mollweide",GEOGCS["GCS_WGS_1984",DATUM["WGS_1984",SPHEROID["WGS_1984",6378137,298.257223563]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295]],PROJECTIONMollweide,PARAMETER["False_Easting",0],PARAMETER["False_Northing",0],PARAMETER["Central_Meridian",0],UNIT["Meter",1],AUTHORITY["EPSG","54009"]]

Any chance to get in? Maybe by a "clean-room" implementation based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollweide_projection ?

comment:4 by Even Rouault, 7 years ago

Cc: Lucian Plesea added

Adding Lucian Plesea in CC.

Lucian, would you know people at ESRI that could help determining if the data/esri_extra.wkt file can be distributed with a free license acceptable by Linux distributions (ideally X/MIT so as to not complicate GDAL licensing) ?

comment:5 by Lucian Plesea, 7 years ago

Who did the original work on creating this file?

in reply to:  5 comment:6 by Markus Neteler, 7 years ago

Replying to Lucian Plesea:

Who did the original work on creating this file?

According to the SVN log, it got added 11 years ago by Frank W in r5926

comment:7 by Even Rouault, 6 years ago

ESRI has just released https://github.com/Esri/projection-engine-db-doc which is an updated version of esri_extra.wkt under Apache 2 license. I'll proceed to integrating it soon in GDAL trunk

in reply to:  7 comment:8 by Markus Neteler, 6 years ago

Replying to Even Rouault:

ESRI has just released https://github.com/Esri/projection-engine-db-doc which is an updated version of esri_extra.wkt under Apache 2 license. I'll proceed to integrating it soon in GDAL trunk

Great news! That frees "World Mollweide" and also many other definitions...

comment:9 by Even Rouault, 6 years ago

Resolution: fixed
Status: newclosed

In 41226:

Update data/esri_extra.wkt and add data/esri_epsg.wkt, taken from https://github.com/Esri/projection-engine-db-doc (Apache v2 license) (fixes #2163)

comment:10 by Even Rouault, 6 years ago

Milestone: 2.3.0

comment:11 by Even Rouault, 6 years ago

In 41390:

PROVENANCE.TXT: update for esri_extra.wkt (refs #2163) [ci skip]

in reply to:  9 ; comment:12 by Markus Neteler, 6 years ago

Replying to Even Rouault:

In 41226:

Update data/esri_extra.wkt and add data/esri_epsg.wkt, taken from https://github.com/Esri/projection-engine-db-doc (Apache v2 license) (fixes #2163)

Is there a chance to backport this to the 2.2 branch? It will take a while to see GDAL 2.3 widely supported in the various distributions ...

in reply to:  12 comment:13 by Even Rouault, 6 years ago

Is there a chance to backport this to the 2.2 branch? It will take a while to see GDAL 2.3 widely supported in the various distributions ...

Given the amount of changes, it is more like a new feature than strictly a bug fix (we are relatively conservative regarding backporting). That said, you could just replace the existing esri_extra.wkt with the one from trunk and that should work fine. And I'm not sure there will be a new 2.2.x release before 2.3 is out.

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