[Snowball-discuss] License file shipping required by BSD license

[Martin Porter]

Thanks Olly.

A problem is that the snowball code can be used in many ways: there
are contributed stemmers in a variety of programming languages. These
are quite separate, and many do not contain a licence statement. I
can't go through adding the BSD licence text in (I don't know the
comment conventions for all the programming languages involved), and I
certainly don't want to bother all the contributors. There are the
generated stemmers in C and Java. These, with the extra bit of library
code to drive them, are no doubt used much more widely than the
snowball compiler itself. The algorithms themselves, and the
vocabularies and stopword lists, are also, in a sense, BSD licenced,
except that they are algorithms and data rather than software. Anyway,
for snowball there is no one single download.

The easiest thing is to add the BSD licence into the compiler header
file, but I'm not sure that would cover everything Jan requires.

Jan, could you elaborate on this "it's illegal in some countries (e.g.
in my country :()" note of yours?

For example, the BSD licence says you can alter the code but not
change the licence, so if you alter the code by adding in the text of
the BSD licence that must be legal. Then you can pass it on to someone
else and satisfy your country's laws. If you can't even add in the BSD
licence without breaking the law ... well ... what's the worse that
can happen?

Martin