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

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Thu Aug 23 13:42:27 BST 2007


On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 07:43:05AM +0100, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> You are probably right about the unnecessary strictness of the license
> of the generated code; but changing that will only make distribution
> of the xapian-php module source clearer.

That will at least resolve the problem that we (Xapian) are currently
distributing a file which claims to have two incompatible licences.

I can believe there may be other issues here, but those haven't
actually been reported, and this SWIG issue probably affects other
SWIG/PHP users, so let's try to sort out this problem first.

> However, despite the original bug report, the compiled php-xapian
> makes use of php/zend header files and structures and so is derived
> from it.

It's probably not especially relevant here, but copyrightable works need
to have a creative element, which often means header files aren't
actually copyrightable, even though copyright may be claimed in the
licence boilerplate.

> It is this mechanism that most people confuse with linking,
> because linking (generally) requires knowledge of header files.

The issue isn't really linking or header files or memory spaces.  It's
what constitutes a derived work in copyright law.

Cheers,
    Olly



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