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

[William S Fulton]

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?
> 

I think this is a non-issue. The SWIG licence is a BSD style licence so 
the SWIG source and supporting files, such as typemaps can be 
incorporated into any other code. If you are using the source, then you 
have to acknowledge the copyright holders. As you are probably not 
shipping SWIG with xapian, then you don't need to even do that.

In the past you might have had to ship the libswigphp.so runtime library 
from SWIG, but now that is not needed and isn't even shipped with SWIG 
anymore. Even if SWIG still shipped it, it was BSD style licenced so can 
be linked to code compiled with just about anything else.

IANAL etc.

William