[Xapian-discuss] license issue

[Sam Liddicott]

Hi SWIG architects.

This is a general problem where the swig targets license is not compatable wit the library being swig-ified.

The compiled swigified target library is a derivative of the target system (php, chicken, perl, etc), a derivative of swig, and also a derivative of the imported library.

SWIG is pretty liberal so the problem exists between the library and the target.

SWIG can solve this architectually which would make swig legally useful as well as technically indispensable. 

As the swig model is pretty rich, any import-library generated code does not need to be a derivative of the swig-target system. I.e. There might be a libswig-xapian which joins the xapian (or other library interface) in terms of swig primatives, and a libswig-php that maps that swig api to the php api.

SWIG itself could be generous with the licensing of libswif-TARGET and the generated code for libswig-xapian, and thus there is no code that is derived from the imported library and the target system.

David, what are your feelings on this?

I think if swig architecture could solve this that swig could be a good solution to license proliferation as well as emphasise the uselessness of such proliferation that can be side-stepped by automatic code generators...

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: "Alexander Lind" <malte at webstay.org>
To: swig-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Cc: "Xapian Discussion" <xapian-discuss at lists.xapian.org>
Sent: 20/08/07 23:05
Subject: [Xapian-discuss] license issue

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
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