[htdig-dev] Re: Licenses, general state of packaging

[Robert R. <ri...@li...>]

Neal Richter wrote:

>Robert,
>
>  Thanks for your efforts here!  We have little contact from the other
>Linux distros.... which tells me that Debian is more on-the-ball on
>License audits of code that is included.
>  
>
Side note: it needs to be, since it is the only distribution i know of 
that rigurously distinguishes between 'free', 'free but depending on 
non-free stuff' (they call it contrib), and 'non-free'. This distinction 
is mainly a question of licensing.

>  
>
>>It is also my understanding that Sleepycat's license for DB is compatible
>>with GPL, but not LGPL.
>>    
>>
>
>  Yep.
>
>  
>
>>It's a whole other ball of wax for the 3.2 code base.  There, Neal
>>negotiated a special license with Sleepycat that allows us to distribute
>>our modified DB code with the LGPL'ed 3.2 ht://Dig code, provided the
>>bundled DB code is used only for ht://Dig or libhtdig.  If it's unbundled,
>>it reverts to Sleepycat's standard license.
>>
>>Neal and Geoff, please chime in if you have anything to add.
>>    
>>
>
>[This next part applies only to HtDig 3.2.x]
>
>  Note that for 3.2 the HtDig license is LGPL.
>
>  If a 'LGPLed 3.2 HtDig + custom DBD with custom Sleepycat License'
>causes you license indigestion for Debian..... feel free to make the whole
>thing GPL and remove the special Sleepycat/BDB License Exception in your
>source package.
>
>  If you do this, we would kindly ask that any patches you submit to us
>for HtDig 3.2.x be LGPLed by you so we can include them in the stock HtDig
>3.2.x tree.
>
>  I know this is a bit wierd, but it's legit since the HtDig group is
>allowed by copyright law (as copyright holders of our code) to interpret
>the LGPL as we see fit.
>
>  And Sleeycat did the same by making a HtDig specific exception to their
>license to allow us to move to the LGPL and still use BDB.
>
>  FYI:  It looks like for HtDig 4.0 we MAY be abandoning BDB, and be
>replacing it with an LGPL'd Lucene/CLucene.. so the wierd licensing issue
>goes away.
>
>Thanks again.
>
>Neal Richter
>Knowledgebase Developer
>  
>
Hello Neal,  Hello Developers' list,

At the moment I am still in the process of cleaning up the 3.1.6 
package, which will be released (and included in sarge) as 'htdig' 
(Version 1:3.1.6-8 or later). Htdig 3.2.0b6 (or later) will go into the 
tree as 'htdig-3.2' (and might not be included in sarge, who knows). At 
the moent the idea is to have the two packages conflict with each other, 
but thats really my problem. Alll this was done to remedy the speed 
issues 3.2.0b6 still has compared to 3.1.6.

To come back to the point: As a debian developer I am required to 
summarize the licensing situation in a file called 'copyright' in the 
debian-tree of the package.

All the following applied to 3.1.6 only:

- I was able to remove the 'db' folder (Berkely DB V.2.6.2) and replace 
it with the stock libdb2(-dev) package of Debian. In that process, I 
also got from a 4-clause BSD-Style license from Sleeepycat et al. to a 
3-Clause BSD-Style license. Since,however, this license is part of the 
package I link against, I no longer need to worry about it. You link a 
GPL package against libdb2, which seems to be fair enough (countless 
other debian packages also do it).

What I still need to do is to adapt the debian installation and 
maintenance scripts a little; so i guess my 'htdig' 3.1.6-8 package will 
enter the archive about the end of this week:

(Excerpt from the changelog)

>  * Patched htfuzzy so that it does not die on words of non-alpha 
> characters
>     only when searching for numbers is enabled and a soundex search is
>     performed. Thanks to Alex Kiesel for this patch. This is a patch 
> provided
>     by the Ht://Dig developer team.
>   * Patched htnotify race condition. Htnotify would sit there eating up
>     memory, appending newlines to an empty string. As Martin Kraemer
>     discovered, an additional check fixes the problem. This patch is also
>     provided by the Ht://Dig developer team.
>   * Added a patch that allows the correct skipping of JavaScript code. 
> Work
>     attributed to Gilles Detillieux. Patch provided by upstream.
>   * Have external parsers check for the maximal Document size 
> (max_doc_size).
>     Work attributed to Gilles Detillieux. Patch provided by upstream
>   * Fixed the rating of percent values. For some unknown reason, 
> including a
>     percent value would rate the document higher than it should. Patch
>     provided by upstream (and not attributable to a person).
>   * A set of patches brings the HTML documentation up to date, fixing 
> errors
>     and clearing ambinguities. Thanks to Gilles Detillieux for these 
> patches.
>     Also provided by the upstream developers.

So when htdig-3.1.6 is out (might be on of the last debian revisions to 
it), I'll focus all my attention on the 3.2.0 branch.

Robert