On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:46:12AM -0700, Neal Richter wrote:
> Yep, this is one of the problems with Open Source. It would be smart
> for all licenses to have a 'time horizon' on them where if the copyright
> is not updated in 5-10 years it becomes either public-domain or the
> copyright is assigned to some third party.
A nice idea, though I suspect it might be hard to sell such a licence to
corporate types. As it was BrightStation wanted to roll their own
licence rather than use the GPL. There are already too many mutually
incompatible "open source" licences.
Sadly copyright law has been moving towards longer copyright periods
rather than shorter.
> > 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.
>
> Here's a proposal for you:
>
> Could you break down what portions of Xapian that are 'ownership clean'
> and able to be changed into the LGPL?
It's pretty easy actually. If the copyright notices on a file include
BrightStation or Ananova (I believe the latter is a strict subset of the
former) then it can't simply be relicensed. Some time ago I informally
asked all the other copyright holders, and they're probably OK with it.
We use an autoptr implementation taken from the GNU ISO C++ library,
which is GPL + a library exception. But that could easily be replaced
by something from boost.
We replaced the original stemming code with code from snowball, which is
new-style BSD. The queryparser has recently been rewritten from
scratch. The Java bindings are new-style BSD, and the Perl bindings are
the same licence as Perl (your choice of GPL or Perl's Artistic
licence). Some of the other binding code is OK too. Some of the
examples have been written from scratch, so they're OK. And we use GNU
getopt (which is LGPL).
I've probably missed some, but that's a rough idea.
Not all code needs to be relicensed actually. Having a GPL testsuite
isn't really a problem, and the muscat36 backend could be dropped (or
left GPL so you'd be able to use the library under the GPL with the
muscat36 backend to convert your old databases to Xapian ones).
Similarly, the examples and utility programs could be left as GPL too.
Cheers,
Olly
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