Wow, that was quick :)

Agree that your solution is a safer one license wise, and deployment simply by 
dropping in the jar is as simple as it gets.

Questions:
* What is the correct mimetype? tika-mimetypes.xml lists application/vnd.ms-tnef
  I see references to application/ms-tnef other places, should we support both?
* The 3rd party developers do not necessarily accept contributions
  Rather than forking, could an alternative be to build a "glue" jar of the 
Tika files only?
* Could we legally include with Tika a maven target or script which downloads 
3rd party jars? 
  That would benefit developers (broader distribution) as well as the Tika 
community (better file format support).

I started by creating a wiki page to list known 3rd party parser plugins.

--
Jan Høydahl, search solution architect
Cominvent AS - www.cominvent.com

On 30. sep. 2010, at 22.33, Jukka Zitting wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Nick Burch <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Jan Høydahl / Cominvent wrote:
>>> We could implement the decoder without distributing tnef.jar, using
>>> Class.forName() and simply disabling the decoder if the jar is not on
>>> classpath? Then it is up to the user to download the jar and thereby accept
>>> the GPL license.
>> 
>> I've got a feeling that that may still be too closely linked to be allowed,
>> but hopefully someone else can point us to the answer.
> 
> You're right. The copyleft effects would start to creep in as soon as
> we write Class.forName("net.freeutils.tnef....").
> 
>> There's nothing stopping you writing a GPL licensed parser with a hard
>> dependency, and including it yourself though.
> 
> Creating an example of how to do this has long been on my TODO list,
> and since jtnef is such a simple library I decided to use it for the
> example. See [1] for my fork of the latest jtnef sources, and [2] for
> the commit where I added Tika support to it. Thanks to TIKA-317 [3],
> you can add the resulting jtnef jar to your classpath, and Tika will
> automatically pick it up for parsing any application/x-tnef documents.
> 
> [1] http://github.com/jukka/jtnef
> [2] 
> http://github.com/jukka/jtnef/commit/a9a51982165101c0bdda4cb5266d7f8958c271ef
> [3] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-317
> 
> BR,
> 
> Jukka Zitting

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