Jeff Davey wrote:> Is there a possibility of purchasing a non-GPL license of Xapian?
To a first approximation, no. The copyright on Xapian is held by a
multitude (well, several) of people and organisations; some of these
would probably be willing to license the parts of the code they hold
copyright on under a different license, but it would be necessary to get
agreement from all the copyright holders.
In particular, a reasonable proportion of the code was developed by a
company called "BrightStation" (or Muscat, or SmartLogik, depending on
the exact date you pick) which began the development of Xapian (which
was then called by a different name), but later pulled out. I don't
know who now owns the copyright on the code which was developed by them
(I've heard conflicting claims) but in any case you'd be unlikely to be
able to acquire a license.
The only way to get a non-GPL license therefore is to get agreement from
as many developers as possible, and then to replace any pieces of code
which are not owned by those developers with newly written code. We
have discussed this in the past, but it's not something that's going to
happen overnight. However, it could be a feasible project, if you were
willing to wait long enough, and pay for enough developer time. I'd
guess it would be around 6 months work, but I could be way out (in
either direction) - the first task would be to audit the code ownership
and see how much actually needs doing. I imagine that the developer
time required to do that would cost several tens of thousands of pounds.
(Considerably less than the cost of developing something like Xapian
from scratch, of course.)
We've been careful to keep all code history, and every source file in
Xapian should contain details of all the people (or companies) which
have held copyright on part of that file. It would probably be
necessary manually to go through the history of each file to determine
how much of each copyright holder's code is still in the file, or had
been replaced by later changes.
Speaking personally, I'd probably be willing to allow code I hold
copyright on to be licensed under the LGPL, because this would allow the
library to be used in quite a few more situations, but I'm not convinced
that licensing it under a more permissive license than that would be
good for the future of Xapian - I'd rather that any effort spent on
making changes to Xapian was available to be merged into the main
repository to improve Xapian.
See the "README" file, or http://xapian.org/history.php, for some of
the
corporate history which is relevant to this.
Also, note that I'm not a lawyer: I believe that legally if we replaced
all the code owned by "BrightStation" with clearly original
implementations, but left the overall design (and API) the same, you
would be able to claim that BrightStation no longer owned any copyright
on the code, but you'd need to check that with a lawyer very carefully.
--
Richard