FDO Provenance Review
Introduction
Last Updated: 26 September 2006.
This page details information from files in the OSGeo FDO Subversion repository and its Subprojects located at:
This page documents the results of a License audit of the OSGeo FDO project and its SubProjects. It is done in accordance with the OSGEO Foundation guidelines at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Code_Provenance_Review
Goal
To establish a reasonable comfort level that projects going through incubation do not have improperly contributed code, and that the code is all under the project license.
A code provenance review is desirable because it reduces the risk of the foundation, project developers or software users becoming involved in a legal action or having their use of the software disrupted by sudden removal of improperly contributed code. In particular, many enterprises will not build on open source software projects without some degree of assurance that care is being taken to avoid improper contributions.
It is not the goal to be able to prove that every source file, and every contribution to those files, was contributed properly. The onus is not on us to prove there are no problem. However we want to ensure we do not release code with provenance issues that we could have identified and corrected with a reasonable effort.
History
Origins
Autodesk needed a technology that could provide a way to access many different geospatial data sources through a common mechanism. The data sources included a variety of geospatial databases and file formats. It had to be flexible to meet the needs of many client applications. The initial requirements included the following
• Provides an object-based feature model of geospatial data that is generic and independent of any particular native implementation.
• Supports, as a minimum, the OGC Simple Feature specification geometry types.
• Defines a logical model that maps to commonly used physical implementations such as Oracle Spatial and SHP files.
• Defines an FDO Provider as an implementation of the FDO API for a particular data source. Each data source has its corresponding FDO provider.
• Defines a capabilities API to allow clients to determine specific capabilities of a particular provider and thus respond correctly to the provider to which they are connected.
• Allows new commands and schema additions to be easily added over time to the generic API and allows custom commands to be added to a particular provider. The capabilities API allows a client to discover the custom commands.
Before Open Source
The first version of FDO was shipped with the Autodesk Map 3D 2005 product in the spring of 2004. It included providers for Oracle and SDF. Version 2.0 added the ArcSDE provider, and version 3.0 added providers for MySQL, SQL Server, ODBC, SHP, Raster, OGC WFS, and OGC WMS.
FDO Goes Open Source
The release of FDO as open source coincided with the release of MapGuide as open source in 2006. It included the SDF, SHP, MySQL, ArcSDE, ODBC, OGC WFS, and OGC WMS providers. In general, Autodesk developers and customers were demanding: • Faster innovation of our web mapping solutions
• More frequent software releases
• Lower cost of entry and ownership
In light of these requirement, Autodesk wanted to help make map serving technologies more readily available for widespread adoption. The conclusion was that joining and supporting the existing open geospatial community and open sourcing its next-generation web mapping platform was the best approach.
Third-Party Library/Component Review
FDO contains third-party software that is licensed by the copyright holder on terms specific to that software. Information on the third party licenses are specified below:
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Origin: http://www.opengeospatial.org/
Copyright
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