<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Like Amish Shah who posted earlier this month to this list I find
myself interested in Xapian, but currently not being able to use it
due to its GPL license. I am aware of the CommercialLicence wiki
page, but have not been able to find any current status or anything
willing to work on it, so I am wondering if perhaps I could help. As
far as I can see several things would need to happen:<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>a new license (or set of licenses) will need to be chosen</li>
<li>current copyright holders will need to sign off on the
relicensing</li>
<li>dependencies on GPLed libraries (think getopt) will need to
replaced</li>
</ul>
<p><br>
Looking at older posts and the xapian website it seems that LGPL
has been suggested as an alternative license, but I can not find a
clear decision.<br>
</p>
Judging by the copyright statements in the sources (for xapian-core)
there are 18 copyright holders, which is a manageable list:<br>
<br>
<ul>
<li>Action Without Borders</li>
<li>Adam Sjøgren</li>
<li>Ananova Ltd</li>
<li>Brandon Schaefer</li>
<li>BrightStation PLC</li>
<li>Dan Colish</li>
<li>Dr Martin Porter</li>
<li>Evgeny Sizikov</li>
<li>Hein Ragas</li>
<li>Kan-Ru Chen</li>
<li>Kevlin Henney</li>
<li>Lemur Consulting Ltd</li>
<li>Olly Betts</li>
<li>Orange PCS Ltd</li>
<li>Richard Boulton</li>
<li>Sam Liddicott</li>
<li>Scriptics Corporation.</li>
<li>Yung-chung Lin</li>
</ul>
<br>
Does anyone have any idea how willing these copyright holders might
be to approve relicensing?<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Wichert.<br>
<br>
</body>
</html>