Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Richard Boulton
On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:41:53PM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Richard Boulton wrote:
>> As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to
>> the FSF.  This would be a showstopper problem for me.
>
> Er, what does Postgres have that is covered by GPL2?

I think cross posting has confused this thread - I was talking about
snowball not postgres.  I don't use postgres at all; in fact, I'm not sure
why this thread was copied to pgsql-hackers at all - sorry for the noise if
there wasn't a good reason.

What I mean is that I use snowball in a project which is GPL-2, and cannot
be relicensed, and snowball changing to ASL 2 would be a showstopper
problem for me for that reason.

-- 
Richard

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Tom Lane
"Kevin Grittner"  writes:
> Where does GPL come into it?  (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for
> either product.)

Keep in mind that you're seeing some fraction of the discussion on
snowball-discuss (whatever is from people also subscribed to
pgsql-hackers; everything else is stuck in the moderation queue).
I would imagine the GPL complaint is from someone who's using the
snowball code in a GPL project.

However, from a Postgres point of view, I'm not sure that we'd be
totally happy with ASL either.  We'd certainly have to stop bundling
the snowball code in the Postgres distribution, as we do now.  Or more
likely, freeze it at the last BSD-licensed release.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Guillaume Smet
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Kevin Grittner
 wrote:
> Where does GPL come into it?  (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for
> either product.)

Richard is one of the developers of Snowball so he might want to keep
its license compatible with GPL2.

Moreover, Snowball is used by a lot of projects, and probably some of
them are GPL2.

Note that ASL2 is however compatible with GPL3.

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Guillaume

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Grant Ingersoll


On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:51 PM, Oleg Bartunov wrote:


Grant,

I'm originator of this thread and PostgreSQL is also a big user of the
Snowball project, so we also are very interested in the vital  
activity of the project. However, I see issue with license, which is

currently BSD and this allows us to use snowball in PostgreSQL (which
is also BSD licensed). Is't possible to preserve BSD license under
Apache Software Foundation ?


No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no?  
(caveat: IANAL)  i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just  
don't take credit for it.  Everything I've read says the two are  
completely compatible





Another question is not about snowball compiler, but about specific
stemmers, which contributed by people. Are you willing also to
support this activity ?


ASF is all about community, so the community would be responsible for  
supporting the activity of the project.  Obviously, Dr. Porter and  
Richard would need to be involved, but one goal of the ASF is that any  
healthy project should be able to survive the loss of a committer.


The way the ASF works, people who contribute a lot would become  
committers, etc., so yeah, I think the answer is yes.  It is a fairly  
well defined process for doing this.  i.e. if you contribute a lot,  
the other committers would nominate you to become a committer.  You  
can read more about how the ASF works at www.apache.org/


HTH,
Grant

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Kevin Grittner
>>> Richard Boulton  wrote: 
> On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
>> No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD,
no?  
>> (caveat: IANAL)  i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just 

>> don't take credit for it.  Everything I've read says the two are  
>> completely compatible
> 
> As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least
according to
> the FSF.  This would be a showstopper problem for me.
 
Where does GPL come into it?  (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for
either product.)
 
-Kevin

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Andrew Dunstan



Richard Boulton wrote:

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
  
No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no?  
(caveat: IANAL)  i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just  
don't take credit for it.  Everything I've read says the two are  
completely compatible



As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to
the FSF.  This would be a showstopper problem for me.

  


Er, what does Postgres have that is covered by GPL2?

cheers

andrew

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Richard Boulton
On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
> No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no?  
> (caveat: IANAL)  i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just  
> don't take credit for it.  Everything I've read says the two are  
> completely compatible

As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to
the FSF.  This would be a showstopper problem for me.

-- 
Richard

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Re: [HACKERS] [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

2009-04-01 Thread Oleg Bartunov

Grant,

I'm originator of this thread and PostgreSQL is also a big user of the
Snowball project, so we also are very interested in the vital 
activity of the project. However, I see issue with license, which is

currently BSD and this allows us to use snowball in PostgreSQL (which
is also BSD licensed). Is't possible to preserve BSD license under
Apache Software Foundation ?

Another question is not about snowball compiler, but about specific
stemmers, which contributed by people. Are you willing also to
support this activity ?

I'm crossposting also to the -hackers discussion list of the PostgreSQL
project.

Oleg
On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Grant Ingersoll wrote:

Forwarding a private message I sent to Dr. Porter to the list as a whole as a 
possible way of addressing Dr. Porter's desire to code less and also the 
desire for releases, etc.  Dr. Porter's response was that I should bring it 
up within the community to gauge other's interest, so here it is:


Hi Dr. Porter,

My name is Grant Ingersoll and I am a committer on the Apache Lucene project 
(http://lucene.apache.org), which is a big user of the Snowball code.  In 
reading this message and hearing of your desire not to code anymore, it 
occurred to me that maybe the Snowball project would be interested in 
becoming a part of the Apache Software Foundation, whereby it can get 
attention from a community of developers/committers.  For instance, just the 
other day, I was thinking about a performance improvement that we could use 
in Lucene land that would allow passing in a char [] array instead of a 
String to the stemmer, since all of our Token objects are represented that 
way and it now forces us to construct a new String every time.


If you're interested, let me know and we can figure out where to go from 
here.  The donation process for projects outside of the ASF is pretty easy 
and I would propose that it become a sub-project of the Lucene project, so 
you can know it will be in good hands.  Naturally, you and Richard would also 
be committers on the project, so you could still be involved as much as you 
like.


At any rate, thanks for the great piece of software.

Cheers,
Grant Ingersoll


So, what do others think about donating the Snowball stemmers to the ASF and 
in particular the Lucene project?  Snowball would likely be a subproject of 
Lucene (like Solr, Mahout, etc.) and people could contribute patches, become 
committers, etc. just as any other ASF project, i.e. based on merit.


-Grant


On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Martin Porter wrote:



Oleg,

Hello, nice to hear from you you again, after so long. Richard and I have
discussed the idea of having a proper release policy from time to time, but
have never managed to put one in place. I think that is acceptable, since
snowball changes less and less as the years go by. (I am 65 now, and want 
to

withdraw from software work in the future.)

As well as the snowball compiler, I have no plans to alter the stemmers
themselves (except perhaps the English stemmer -- I have thought of undoing
or modifying an earlier extension.) The version we're currently releasing 
is

just as stable as the one you used in 2007, and probably little different.





Regards,
Oleg
_
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: o...@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83

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