On Fri, 13 Feb 2015, Allison, Timothy B. wrote:
After I dig myself out of several other issues that I'd like to tackle,
I'd like to add a parser for MSAccess files. There's a pure java LGPL
library, Jackcess, available on maven, and it appears to be quite
active.
I know we have a list of third party parsers, but I'm wondering if we
could write a Tika parser that uses Jackcess but sets it as "provided"
in the pom. This seems to me to be equivalent to our current "excludes"
statements for some other LGPL files.
For a non-ASF apache licensed project, that'd probably be ok. However, the
ASF legal policies are a bit stricter.
There's a brief summary here:
http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#prohibited
And if you check the legal-discuss@ archives
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/ for LGPL
you'll see lots of discussion about how optional features which need LGPL,
plugins which need LGPL code etc need to be handled.
If you think you might be able to compe up with a plan that would fit
within those rules, it's best to run it past the legal-discuss list and/or
raise a legal jira to get it checked. If not, the parser would need to
live elsewhere and be listed on the third party plugins page, with users
who are OK with LGPL rules needing to download them themselves.
(Actually, there's nothing stopping someone publishing an "all Tika
including LGPL" or "all Tika including GPL" pom, which auto-includes
these for those users who can use things under those licenses in their
projects, but for policy reasons it couldn't be a PMC action to publish
that)
Nick
