Re: [Hebmorph-thinktank] HebMorph patch

[Itamar Syn-H. <it...@co...>]

Hi Kirill,


First, thanks for the latest patch which is now merged to master.


The thought behind licensing HebMorph with a restrictive license 
(currently GPL) is to be able to negotiate a usage fee from commercial 
users. This is to make sure the project can stay alive and make real 
progress. And let me elaborate.


HebMorph is much more than just a morphological analyzer. It is about 
inventing and testing ways to search Hebrew texts, to rank them, and 
then to be able to tell which method is better for different scenarios. 
This requires a lot of resources, and to be able to do this, the project 
needs support. Commercial users is where this support should come from; 
as a matter of fact, commercial users should WANT to support this 
project as it will only make their search-based products better as it 
evolves, and it evolves.


There's plenty going on with HebMorph, and I'll be posting about a bunch 
really soon. Searches being made with MorphAnalyzer are showing really 
good performance, and I'm very satisfied with this and am ready to move 
on to the next strategy. HebMorph is definitely ready for production use 
and in fact is already being used in several places (that I know of). 
Being an open-source commercial-grade product, a fair price will always 
be negotiable.


Therefore, as far as I'm concerned, no commercial usage is allowed 
without either purchasing a commercial license or releasing the code 
that uses HebMorph as GPL. Perhaps GPL is not all too strict about this, 
and can be interpreted differently in terms of "derivative work", and I 
might make a license change to reflect that. The general idea, again, is 
to be able to support further development of the project and make sure 
it meets its far-reaching goals.


I hope this makes things clearer.


Itamar.


On 10/06/2011 02:29, kirillkh wrote:

> Hi Itamar,
>
> I have a question regarding HebMorph licensing. Can it be used in 
> closed-source software inside Lucene? Inside Solr? My interpretation 
> of the GPL is that the latter is allowed, but not the former. What's 
> your take on this?
>
> Thanks,
> -Kirill