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

[William S Fulton]

Olly Betts wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 05:07:26PM +0100, William S Fulton wrote:
>> Permission for removing the licence generated into the wrapper file? I 
>> don't know how to get his reasoning without asking him. He may have 
>> decided that everything generated is covered by the php licence or may 
>> have misunderstood the php licence requirements.
>>
>> Maybe the php licence requires all code that uses its headers to be 
>> licenced by the php licence. Can Sam or Olly check with the php guys? 
>> Maybe make use of their licencing email address I gave out earlier?
> 
> There's no need to ask them - there's clearly no such requirement in the
> PHP or Zend licences.
> 
> Both are essentially a BSD-style licence, but including an advertising
> clause (like the old BSD licence did), and a clause requiring you don't
> use "PHP", "Zend", etc to endorse or promote your products (which would
> be better done by trademarking them really).  Also, the PHP licence has
> a clause restricting how you can name your software.
> 
> So it should be fine to mix code licensed under SWIG's licence with code
> under the PHP and/or Zend licences - essentially you'd end up with a
> licence with the restrictions imposed by each of the licences, and none
> of these appear to conflict.
> 

Given that:

1) There is no requirement by PHP when using the PHP headers to license 
the generated code under the PHP license
2) The PHP licence conflict's with SWIG's all permissive license which 
allows mixing GPL and non-GPL code
3) The fact that SWIG has always intended to have a single all 
permissive licence for the generated code, ie not impose any license 
restriction on the generated code
4) We have made best effort to contact Richard Palmer
5) In all likelihood Richard misunderstood the PHP licensing 
requirements and it was mistakenly used

I have removed this licence text from the generated code. The generated 
code now contains the same information as the other language modules.

If anyone genuinely believes that the code that the SWIG php module 
generates should be licensed under the PHP license, please speak up and 
I will remove the php module altogether from SWIG until/if whatever 
requires this license is rewritten.

William