conterra

Licensing of OGC services surely is a means to get more data published, which requires certain agreements and which otherwise is just locked away. At the recent GSDI World Conference (GSDI 13) in Quebec City I heard much talk about harmonizing license conditions in order to make it easier to classify them and build tools to support them. I fully agree that this would make life much easier, especially for software vendors like con terra. But our experience in dealing with these issues practically for many years – and in providing an off-the-shelf product to support users in their licensing efforts – is that license conditions have to implement a data provider's business model, not the other way round.