gpclib and IPR
On 08/05/2010 08:56 PM, Roger Bivand wrote:
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<rant> The gpclib package should be avoided, and will be replaced by rgeos shortly. The PBSmapping authors claim to have received permission to bundle GPC under GPL, but the license constraints are not made manifest in the license of PBSmapping - this mess also needs attention. That the University of Manchester has arguably hijacked the intellectual property of an employee is appears scandalous, and is in itself good enough reason to avoid GPC, despite its being a nice piece of work. As I mentioned, the R interface to GEOS should be available shortly, and hopefully PBSmapping will switch to that code. </rant>
Sorry this is a bit off-topic, but not irrelevant. I believe that in many universities in western Europe (in any case Netherlands and Germany), universities simply have this property. The question is how they deal with it, and what they allow employees. It varies where the real power about it lies and whether it's managed -- it seems in the UK and the Netherlands some kind of management layer has it, whereas in Germany it ultimately seems to be in the hands of the professors.
Edzer Pebesma Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of M?nster Weseler Stra?e 253, 48151 M?nster, Germany. Phone: +49 251 8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763 http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de http://www.52north.org/geostatistics e.pebesma at wwu.de