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

[Alexander Lind]

Alexander Lind wrote:
> Hello SWIG developers
>
> I am a long time user of a certain GPL:ed search engine called Xapian 
> [ http://www.xapian.org ].
> Xapian is written in C++, but the makers have been providing bindings 
> for other languages for a long time, most of them generated with SWIG.
>
> I use the PHP binding, which has worked great so far, but there is 
> some dark clouds on the horizon - licensing clouds.
>
> Apparently the PHP license does not play nice with the standard GPL 
> license, and this means that Xapian must stop making and distributing 
> the swig PHP bindings unless one of the following fixes can be made:
>
> 1. Either PHP or Xapian must change their licenses to be compatible 
> with the other. Neither is possible I have been told (due to 3rd party 
> involvement in Xapians case).
>
> 2. One person who was involved with making the swig / xapian 
> php-bindings once, wrote me this, and I quote:
> /"It may be worth bringing this problem up on the swig mailing list, 
> as they are in the best position to solve this generally, perhaps even 
> quickly. It may just require a change of compilation pattern; for many 
> swig targets (I recall) uses a libswig.* If the libswig-php or 
> libswig-perl had the run-time derived code and was BSD licensed (or 
> something very free) for the binary, then that's the problem solved, 
> and it would make swig more "useful" although whether that is more 
> desirable than pressuring php to change their license I will leave for 
> others to advocate."
> /
> So my question is, is this feasible?  Is it indeed a quick fix?  Would 
> you consider implementing it?
>
> It is my understanding that any standard GPL:ed software would have 
> the same problem with PHP, so perhaps making this 'fix' would legalize 
> many other existing and future swig / php applications as well?
>
> Thanks for your time
> Alec
>
I doubleposted this to the xapian list as well. I should have bcc:ed though.

I hope I didn't get any important details wrong. If so please correct me.

Alec