Re: [Hebmorph-thinktank] HebMorph patch

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

Commercial licensing is hands down the best way for this project to stay 
alive and be able to make real progress. I'm not restricting commercial 
use per se, since I can't imagine how more forthcoming can I be to allow 
usage of HebMorph in commercial software. It's quite simple I think: if 
you make money using this software, please support the project making 
it. Since we can't really depend on donations, we use licensing to 
enforce that. And as I told you in the private conversation we had - its 
not at all about greediness, and I guarantee in any negotiation of 
commercial licensing the final agreement will be such that both sides 
will feel is fair.


HebMorph is GPL because it is intended at forging new ideas. Not all 
that would come out of HebMorph is going to be strict software. There 
would be (and already are) ideas that you can use with whatever tool and 
whatever license. That I can't, and won't, put under any license.


HebMorph is GPL also because that is hspell's license (including their 
dictionary files), and it is definitely considered of being a derivative 
work since MorphAnalyzer uses that dictionary extensively. Part of any 
fee that would be charged for HebMorph is going to be paid to the hspell 
authors, which have made an amazing work spanning more than 10 years, 
and they should definitely get paid for any commercial use made with 
their work. I've already talked to them and all that has been settled - 
HebMorph's commercial license would include a license to use the hspell 
dictionary (only for search though).


I'm still undecided about what to do with licensing here. I'm not going 
to go any more permissive than this, but also would like to believe a 
license change is not necessary to avoid arguably-valid legal exploits, 
as people and companies would act in good faith. In any case, I'm never 
going to make this project proprietary, as I do believe in the power of 
open-source and community


Itamar.


On 10/06/2011 11:39, kirillkh wrote:

> Hi Itamar,
>
> My original assumption was that your license choice was dictated by 
> the HSpell license or other external factors. For that reason, I 
> thought you would be forthcoming in finding a comfortable way of 
> distributing HebMorph inside commercial software. Since it is now 
> clear that part of the motivation was restricting commercial use, I'm 
> not going to continue looking for ways to do that (although I do 
> believe that in other circumstances that would be okay both legally 
> AND morally - in the end, the spirit of the GPL restriction is to 
> prohibit making non-free derivative works in the original sense of 
> this phrase and allow other usage; no one would call a bug tracker a 
> derivative work even if it uses Lucene+HebMorph for search).
>
> -Kirill
>
> 2011/6/10 Itamar Syn-Hershko <it...@co... 
> <mailto:it...@co...>>
>
>     On 10/06/2011 05:27, kirillkh wrote:
>
>     > Still, some questions remain:
>     > 1. Are you even allowed to distribute Lucene+HebMorph+(your
>     > open-source software), considering Lucene is not GPL?
>
>      From what I came up with when initially looking into GPL a while
>     back,
>     yes. GPL allows you to use or rely on non-GPL software. It doesn't
>     make
>     sense to be allowed to code GPL only from scratch or for other GPL
>     apps.
>
>     > 2. A normal program based on Lucene+HebMorph will use the Lucene
>     API,
>     > not the HebMorph API (I don't know Lucene's API, but I suspect
>     there's
>     > a way to configure its analyzers through the configuration files;
>     > otherwise it's easy to program a Lucene extension that would do just
>     > this). So one can say that the program does not link to HebMorph
>     > directly - rather, it links to Lucene; furthermore, even Lucene
>     > doesn't link to HebMorph directly: rather, it links to a generic
>     > "Analyzer" API, which it provides itself. Does this mean that a
>     > closed-source program is allowed use Lucene+HebMorph?
>     Incorrect. In your code you are going to have to create HebMorph
>     objects
>     (at least an analyzer). You'll be talking to HebMorph directly. I
>     think
>     you'll find the flexibility loss when using config files is too
>     great to
>     be worth it, and I honestly don't think that will work around the GPL
>     issue (because now you rely on Lucene which relies on GPL software, so
>     you rely on GPL).
>
>     As I said in a previous mail, the real question is whether to use a
>     license with a stiffer bite, or to rely on people to act in good faith
>     and remain with GPL. And I can certainly see how GPL can be
>     enforced in
>     such scenarios, especially when there's a publicly available
>     discussion
>     about exactly that.
>
>     Itamar.
>
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