[Snowball-discuss] [HACKERS] Snowball release cycle ?

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 06:36:24PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
> Ah, don't you love all the fun of open source licenses?  ;-)  I  
> personally can never keep 'em straight anymore.

I just wish people would stop inventing more and pick one of the existing
ones.

> At any rate, your concerns, Richard, make total sense.  I don't want  
> any users of Snowball to feel left out.  I was merely letting the  
> maintainers of Snowball know that, if they aren't interested in coding  
> as much anymore (as indicated by Dr. Porter's email), that Snowball,  
> in all likelihood, has a home at the ASF if the community wants it.   

The Apache licence isn't a bad licence, but Xapian is stuck with GPLv2+
unless/until we manage to replace all the original Open Muscat code).

There was some disagreement about whether Apache v2.0 and GPLv2 were
compatible - Apache seemed to think yes, FSF no (FSF's argument seems
stronger to me, as Apache does have patent-related restrictions not
present in GPLv2).  Apache's current take is here:

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

We could update Xapian's licence to GPLv3+ for compatibility, but I
don't think that would benefit our users.  We'd prefer Xapian to be
under a more liberal licence, not a more restrictive one.  I've also
stated in the past that we weren't intending to make this change, and
I'd prefer not to go back on that.

So we'd be forced to fork the last BSD-licensed version if this
happened.  I don't particularly mind if that's necessary (we do in fact
already have a modified version of Snowball in the Xapian tree, but the
intention is to merge back changes - we have just rather lost momentum
on doing so), but I suspect we aren't alone in needing a BSD-licensed
version, and it seems sad to split development effort and confusing to
new users if there are multiple "Snowballs".

> What is great to see, though, is that there is definitely a community  
> of interested people here, so I trust it will all work out.

The lack of visible changes to Snowball is really a sign that it is
fairly mature rather than that there's not much interest in it.

Cheers,
    Olly

P.S. Does ASF actually require the Apache licence to be used?  I just
noticed on the URL I cited above that it says:

    "The Apache Software Foundation does not allow its own projects to
    distribute software under licenses more restrictive than the Apache
    License"

I read that as saying that less restrictive licences are allowed.  I
failed to find a definitive statement anywhere obvious about this
though.