> So the upshot of this seems to be that we can use Xapian, "link" to it and > even > bundle the source code if we wished.
They're compatible, sure. But the downside is that by tying the packages together you'd effectively be subjecting the whole project to the terms of the GPL. Making a proprietary fork of the project would be made more difficult (a fundamental right of the Apache license). Of course, this doesn't matter at all to me as I only deal in free software, but it complicates things a bit. Apparently it scares the heck out of an awful lot of suits. I remember how difficult it was for me to convince the Library of Congress that they wouldn't have to release all their source code if I integrated even an LGPL tool (TinyMCE) into one of their systems. They're still not completely convinced. If it were plain GPL, I can't even imagine how that would have went.
