Nutch's current license is essentially the Apache 1.0 license.
With Lucene I started out using GPL but received numerous complaints from folks who could not use Lucene under those terms. I did not like excluding developers simply because they work on commercial software products. So I first switched Lucene to LGPL. The complaints decreased, but persisted. Then Lucene moved to Apache, and adopted Apache's license. Since then I have not heard a single complaint. So, in my experience, an Apache-style license is preferred to GPL my most developers.
When we started Nutch we were uncertain which license would be best. So we formed a non-profit in order to be able to assign it copyright and hence retain the right to subsequently switch licenses. I thought that perhaps a license like the Affero (http://www.affero.org/oagpl.html) or the OSL (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-2.1.php) might be appropriate, since they might enforce Nutch's transparency goals. These licenses try to plug the "server hole" in the GPL, where folks running services based on GPL-licensed software are not required to distribute their code modifications. But even such licenses cannot make a search engine transparent. Folks can easily write auxiliary programs which manipulate Nutch indexes and databases to alter results and rankings as they please. Such programs would not be derivived from Nutch software and hence would not be subject to Nutch's license. I spoke about this with Eben Moglin, and he confirmed that no software license can force Nutch-based search engines to operate transparently.
So, is it worth discouraging some developers with a GPL-like license in order to ineffectively encourage transparency? I don't think so.
My belief is that we should disband the Nutch non-profit organization and assign the copyright for Nutch software to the Apache Foundation, switching Nutch's license to Apache version 2.0. Are there any developers who object to this?
Doug
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