Re: [CLucene-dev] Re: license (clarification)

[<rg...@sd...>]

>>>>> "Max" == Max Khesin <ma...@to...> writes:
Max> 
Max> Hi Rob,
Max> all of this is great if you are not modifying the original
Max> code. Let's say you are tightly integrating your code with
Max> clucene, via source rather than a shared library. You may be ok
Max> with lgpl, or somebody can theoretically come and demand you to
Max> publish all your code under 'derived works' clause.  Maybe you
Max> will win the case, after shelling out your hard-earned money for
Max> lawers or maybe you will loose or give up. This is very
Max> improbable, but you cannot have real peace of mind without a
Max> short clear license like apache. 

There's no "maybe" about it, if you distribute a binary that is
produced partitially from LGPL code and doesn't provide all the
source, you will be in violation of the license, unless incorporates
the LGPL code through the specific method of linking the library (and
provided source to that library, including any changes you made).  It
would not be a "somebody" who sued, the only person who could sue you
for that would be the author or authors of CLucene; so at least you
know who to buy off ;)

Max> And apache would not prevent people like me from
Max> contributing/improving the main open-source apache.

Both licenses would allow you to share your changes if you wanted, so
that's not really the issue is it ?  The issue is that you want to NOT
share your changes, and the LGPL doesn't allow that and the Apache
does.

It's not my code and I'm plunging ahead with either license.  However,
if you wanted some of my code under the Apache license, I would make
you pay for it -- my reasoning being that I get something for my code,
either access to better versions of it, or money.

Max> This is what I would LIKE to do. Without having a license which
Max> will give me a peace of mind I would rather, frankly, start from
Max> scratch. Anyway, like Doug said, 'with lgpl people complained and
Max> with apache the complains stopped'. So I am going to have to keep
Max> complaining :).

Swish-e is also debating going through a license change discussion,
you might go over to there forum and complain there too :)  They have
mentioned the BSD license, which would statisfy your requirements.

I have conducted a pretty energetic search of all the various index /
search tools looking for what was under which license.  The Managing
Gigabytes stuff is GPL, but there are a small number of authors so you
might ask about a license change there.  The original SWISH was "GPL
or LGPL" according to the announcement:
http://www.rice.edu/sw/swish/patches/kevinh.19970916.html And htdig
and just about everyone else is GPL, and when they aren't GPL they are
written in Java or Perl or another inappropriate language.  Or else
they are designed to be used through a web interface, and would need
modification to make them into a general library.  There are small
projects for searching specific things like bibliographies, but none
of them seem to have the robustness and development that
lucene/clucene have.

Max> BTW a commonly used dataset for searching can be found here:
Max> 
Max>  http://www.daviddlewis.com/resources/testcollections/reuters21578/

I had heard of this, I think it was referenced in the very good book
"Managing Gigabytes".  ( http://www.mds.rmit.edu.au/mg/ )  I was
wanting something easy for sanity testing, and something I knew I
could re-distribute to you guys, so I could make tar file and send it
and say "see, search for this and then grep for it, something's
wrong."

It's actually only 8 MB, that's not bad maybe I'll just use it.

--Rob