Hi, There are a lot of open source projects that have gpl or lgpl licenses, many of which offer functionality for which there is no equivalent project with an apache license. The issue is much broader than just the berkeley parser, and reimplementing every non Apache-license library would not be feasible in any reasonable time frame. I'm curious as to how apache projects that rely on Java EE - e.g. jetty and tomcat - deal with the licensing issue: they must redistribute the Java EE api libraries, which I believe are not on the apache license.
In particular, I don't know of any java based machine learning toolkits that would fit the bill (correct me if I'm wrong, but mahout is designed for map reduce). Libsvm is essential to some of cTAKES' annotators. Other libraries that cTAKES uses are public domain (LVG, JAMA); I assume these don't pose an issue for redistribution. Finally, users will have to download the SNOMED-CT/RXNORM dictionaries from an external web site; why not bundle the non-apache libraries for redistribution there? -vj On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) < [email protected]> wrote: > +1 to making OpenNLP better and eating the ASF dogfood, great response > Jörn. > > Cheers, > Chris > > On Aug 1, 2012, at 5:00 AM, Jörn Kottmann wrote: > > > On 08/01/2012 01:01 PM, Miller, Timothy wrote: > >> There was some chatter last week about resources potentially being > downloaded via maven for license compatibility reasons. Just wondering if > that brings about the possibility of using external libraries that are not > apache-licensed that would also be auto-downloaded under certain maven > build commands. Specifically I was thinking of the GPL-licensed berkeley > parser which I've used to get significantly higher accuracy than the > opennlp parser we currently wrap in our constituency parser module. > > > > Making scripts or maven build commands which download stuff is fine, but > it might > > turn out to be quit limiting for your users which need the freedom of > the AL. That will be > > a problem if Berkeley is the only option. > > > > The HBase people for example have an optional dependency on LZO which is > GPL, > > and people there just need to install and download it themselves. > > See here: > > http://hbase.apache.org/book/lzo.compression.html > > > > Speaking as an OpenNLP committer now, it would of course be nice to make > our parser better. > > If you want to work on that we will be happy to get some patches. > > > > Jörn > > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. > Senior Computer Scientist > NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA > Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246 > Email: [email protected] > WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/ > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department > University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > >
