[Xapian-discuss] Re: [Swig-devel] license issue

[John Lenz]

On 08/21/2007 08:53 PM, Alexander Lind wrote:
> William S Fulton wrote:
>> I think this is a non-issue. The SWIG licence is a BSD style licence 
>> so the SWIG source and supporting files, such as typemaps can be 
>> incorporated into any other code. If you are using the source, then 
>> you have to acknowledge the copyright holders. As you are probably not 
>> shipping SWIG with xapian, then you don't need to even do that.
>>
>> In the past you might have had to ship the libswigphp.so runtime 
>> library from SWIG, but now that is not needed and isn't even shipped 
>> with SWIG anymore. Even if SWIG still shipped it, it was BSD style 
>> licenced so can be linked to code compiled with just about anything else.
>>
>> IANAL etc.
>>
> Thank you for the info, William.
> 
> Now does this mean that the PHP bindings generated with SWIG are alright 
> after all (ie does not violate the PHP license), or does it mean that 
> they are not out of the woods yet, but that this can be fixed by just 
> generating them in a different way?  Or neither?
> 

IANAL, and this is not legal advice, and so on...

As mentioned, as long as you are using a recent version of SWIG, the
libswig libraries have disappeared completely.  There really isn't any
other way to generate the wrapper files.

The SWIG code that appears in the generated _wrap.c file is all that is
needed from the SWIG point of view to run the wrapper.  As SWIG has a very
permissive license, the _wrap.c file can be licensed however you, the user
want.

The SWIG code that happens to be in the _wrap.c file can essentially be
relicensed to whatever you want.  If you want the _wrap.c file to be GPL,
then it is GPL.  If you want it to be PHP 3.01, then ok.

If you are looking into the technicalities, SWIG really has nothing to do
with it.  You just need to select the license for the generated _wrap.c
code so that it works for both projects.

The SWIG generated code can be changed to whichever license satisfies.

John