[Aperture-devel] Plans to relicense Aperture to BSD

[Leo S. <leo...@df...>]

Dear Aperture Developers and SMILA Administrators,

We see benefits if we move Aperture to the BSD license, please read.

In the last months Igor Novakovic, Daniel Stucky, and August Georg 
Schmidt from the Eclipse.org/smila initiative showed interest in the 
Aperture extractors and mime-type identifiers to be used in Eclipse's 
SMILA project.
Also, we have been talking before with the Apache Tika developers about 
reusing Aperture code there.

Both parties (to be more precise: the Eclipse.org lawyers and the 
Apache.org lawyers) had to review our licenses, we use the not-so-common 
AFL and OSL licenses in Aperture. This process can take *months* and 
stops the SMILA people considerably.
It would have been easier for them if we just used BSD.

Chris Fluit and me, as the initial administators of Aperture 
(representing also the corporations sponsoring Aperture at the moment) 
thought that OSL and AFL will help us in different ways. Since these 
licenses cause now a setback for people interested in using Aperture, we 
discussed about it and decided that for us, it is OK to move the whole 
Aperture project to BSD, both API and implementation. It would help our 
new users from SMILA and tika to keep going.
We also see that the spirit of Aperture was always to be a nice, handy, 
usable middleware. If switching to BSD makes it more like our vision, we 
would do it.
This week, Jeroen Wester, Chris, and the people from Aduna discussed 
this and we all decided that it would be a good thing to do it.

Before doing the actual switch, we would like to hear your feedback, 
positive or negative, these are the plans:
* If we switch, we switch soon (within a week) because our friends from 
SMILA are blocked *now* by lawyers, and this is awkward
* We change the license to BSD on the trunk, including all API and 
implementation files of "aperture" (the webserver and add-ons projects 
remain as they are)
* Switching will not include much paperwork and can be done quickly and 
without much hassle, as we have all signed a Code Contributers Agreement 
that covers the legal aspects of this event.
* nothing else changes.

kind regards,
Leo Sauermann (writing the mail, Chris Fluit has a lot to do :-)

p.s. to keep SMILA in motion, a quick answer is preferred

-- 
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DI Leo Sauermann       http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann 

Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer 
Kuenstliche Intelligenz DFKI GmbH
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P.O. Box 2080           Fon:   +49 631 20575-116
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Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats:
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
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