[Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?

[Martin Porter]

Hi, I've followed the discussion as well as I am able given my limited
understanding of these many new license agreements. I cannot see why there
should be an incompatibility between ASL2 and GPL, but if ASL 2 is defined by

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

it is clear that it is more restrictive than the BSD license. And I don't
think we can alter snowball from its BSD license. Really, you can't revoke a
license, unless you replace it with one in every way less restrictive. Of
course you might have old snowball under BSD and new under something else,
but that was not the spirit in which snowball was set up (see below), and
would probably create more work for me and Richard in the long run rather
than less.

The central idea in snowball is "here is a way of exactly defining a
stemming algorithm". So the definitions of the stemmers are central, and the
rest is a kind of demonstration. I wanted that to be free to everyone, in
the way that the 1980 Porter stemmer is. It was meant to be as free as the
air (although I suppose governments will be chanrging for that soon). We
gave it the BSD license as being closest to that desire. The important thing
however is that it should be quite free.