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

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2007 at 06:53:03PM -0700, Alexander Lind wrote:
> 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?

There seems to be rather a lot of confusion and people talking at
cross-purposes here.

Let's look at the original bug reported:

http://www.xapian.org/cgi-bin/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=191

The issue which has been raised is this:

    Quotes from the conversation on IRC with Fedora developers :
    "the problem i'm seeing is that xapian-bindings has bits of code that
    are GPLv2+ and PHP"
    "and it is merging them together into one .cc file and compiling _that_"
    "except, the GPLv2 and PHP are incompatible"
    "BOOM"
    "tell upstream that they can't compile PHP code with GPL* code"

I believe they are referring to the fact that SWIG's PHP backend inserts
licence boilerplate (for the PHP 2.02 licence) into the C/C++ code it
generates.

I'm rather unclear on why it does this.  SWIG is supposed to be licensed
under a permissive BSD-style licence.  This use of the PHP licence is
not mentioned in the file "LICENCE", and the code generated doesn't seem
to be taken from PHP that I can see.

I asked about this very issue in May 2006, but nobody responded then:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.programming.swig.devel/16167

If somebody can explain why this boilerplate is inserted, and what (if
any) part of the generated code it actually applies to, then we should
be able to replace any such code with unencumbered code and resolve this
issue.

Cheers,
    Olly