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

[Sam Liddicott]

I'm now signed back to swig-devel.

William, I think we can easily change the license emitted by the code generator for the php module.

Olly, until then I think it is fine to edit the generated code and change the license. The xapian authors are the ones licensing the code there.

Having swig generate the right license text is just a mtter of conveniece.

Sam



-----Original Message-----
From: "Olly Betts" <olly at survex.com>
To: "Sam Liddicott" <sam at liddicott.com>
Cc: "Xapian Discussion" <xapian-discuss at lists.xapian.org>; "Alexander Lind" <malte at webstay.org>; "William S Fulton" <wsf at fultondesigns.co.uk>; swig-devel at lists.sourceforge.net
Sent: 23/08/07 13:42
Subject: Re: [Xapian-discuss] Re: [Swig-devel] license issue

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