On 2005-02-02, Neal Richter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Xapian is GPL, Lucene/CLucene is LGPL. Evidently the Xapian people
> didn't read the 4th paragraph of
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html
>
> "Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are
> reasons that can make it better to use the Library GPL in certain cases.
> The most common case is when a free library's features are readily
> available for proprietary software through other alternative
> libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any
> particular advantage, so it is better to use the Library GPL for that
> library."
Actually, we have read that.
For many users, the GPL/LGPL distinction won't actually matter - if you
aren't distributing the GPL's restrictions don't apply, so you can
deploy a proprietary application using Xapian on your webserver.
Ideally I'd prefer Xapian to be LGPL licenced (or perhaps something less
restrictive even). But the current developers don't own all the
copyrights, so we can't just pick another licence.
Xapian is derived from software which was released under the GPL by
BrightStation plc. BrightStation's plan was to sell licences to those
wanting to use the code but unwilling to GPL their own code.
I tried to negotiate a relicensing with those who now own the
BrightStation copyright (or at least claim to), but it seemed to just be
an infinite timesink.
I figured a better use of the time would be to simply rewrite any code
we couldn't convince the author to relicence. It's certainly not my
major focus right now, but it's slowly happening naturally.
>> Gmane uses Xapian against 20+ million documents.
Including your message, which I found while testing!
Cheers,
Olly (Xapian developer)
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