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

[Max K. <ma...@to...>]

> There's no "maybe" about it, if you distribute a binary that is
> know who to buy off ;)

If a commericial license was available I would consider it, although at
this early stage my funds are very limited. I just do not think the way
things are now clucene is ready to offer a commercial license, but Ben may
disagree :).

> 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.

The problem is that some changes are not really an improvement of the open
source package as its goals are defined. e.g if I stick clucene in some
cool documentation software I am working on my prog will be subject to
either the open-source req. of lgpl or to the inconvenience of using a
linked binary.  


> 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.

I do not see how you can pull this off under apache. apache means it's
open-source. and even if you do not post your code but sell it to me under
apache i can just go ahead and post it myself. what I have seen some
people do is offer the code under either GPL OR a commercial license. This
way people who do not want to be burdened by GPL can just go ahead and by
the GPL-free license.

> 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.
Maybe I will :). Is it written in an 'appropriate' language?

> and just about everyone else is GPL, and when they aren't GPL they are
> written in Java or Perl or another inappropriate language.  
:). Yes, these are inappropriate. (the authors of original lucene may
disagree)


> 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 have both 1st and recently got 2d editions. My 'dayjob' is working for a
company which developed the 1st (and still the best :) commercial
implementation of JBIG2 image compression. Many principles of symbolic
compression being covered in MG, we are longtime friends :)

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

The advantage is you can say things like 'twice as fast as the X search
engine on the Reuters corpus', similar to the 'CCITT 8' image set when it
comes to compression (static huffman codes in fax machines were optimized
based on these 8 images).

cheers,

max.