Afternoon all. I was discussing the current licensing of Xapian and how it influences the way we work with someone at another OSS project recently, and although the upshot is likely to be that they'll amend their license (it's a corporate foundation, and GPL compatibility is something they desire for precisely this reason), it did prompt me to think about how we're tracking where we are on the license issue. As per <http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/FAQ/CommercialLicence>, we have a clear idea of who owns what (modulo some uncertainty around Brightstation copyright ownership). Certainly for easily-contactable entities, we know who contributed to which file, and indeed could figure out ownership down to the change level. It strikes me that, given many of the current contributors to Xapian are agreed in principle in a bright and shiny future of LGPL licensing, having everyone expressly license their contributions under the LGPL might be a helpful thing. It wouldn't get us any closer to changing the license (which still requires replacing or removing all code that cannot be relicensed), but it will prevent us from getting any further away from that possibility, which might happen if a contributor falls out of contact with the project for whatever reason. What we do not want is to move forward to a position where we should be able to change to LGPL, and then cannot get explicit permission from a contributor for whatever reason; I've been in this situation before, and it's more than slightly frustrating. Since currently the only license grant that occurs on contributions to Xapian is GPL, this needs an explicit statement by each contributor. To get the ball rolling: all code and modifications I have contributed to Xapian may be licensed under either the GPL (as stands) or LGPL (if this is practical for the code in question). Similarly, both the GPL and LGPL may be used for my future contributions. J -- James Aylett talktorex.co.uk - xapian.org - uncertaintydivision.org
2009/8/7 James Aylett <james-xapian at tartarus.org>> To get the ball rolling: all code and modifications I have contributed > to Xapian may be licensed under either the GPL (as stands) or LGPL (if > this is practical for the code in question). Similarly, both the GPL > and LGPL may be used for my future contributions.I discussed this this morning with the other directors of Lemur Consulting, and we're happy to change the license for the contributions we have made. We actually think that LGPL may be too restrictive, so it would be useful to keep the option of using the MIT or Apache2 licenses, too. The MIT license is about as unrestrictive as you can get (other than Public Domain, or attempts to replicate Public Domain with a license), and Apache2 is similar to MIT but with a "mutual annihilation" patent clause. Therefore, Lemur says: All code and modifications that Lemur has contributed to Xapian may be licensed under either the GPL version 2 or later (as stands), or the LGPL version 2.1 or later, or the Apache2 license, or the MIT license, where this is practical for the code in question (ie, except where Lemur does not hold the copyright on the code submitted, and is therefore unable to change the license). Similarly, any of these licenses may be used for future Lemur modifications, unless explicitly stated to the contrary. For the text of these licenses, see (respectively) http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php http://www.opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php http://www.opensource.org/licenses/apache2.0.php http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php -- Richard -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/attachments/20090811/f436f950/attachment-0001.html>