[Xapian-discuss] Commercial License?

[Richard Boulton]

Jeff Davey wrote:
> Is there a possibility of purchasing a non-GPL license of Xapian?

To a first approximation, no.  The copyright on Xapian is held by a 
multitude (well, several) of people and organisations; some of these 
would probably be willing to license the parts of the code they hold 
copyright on under a different license, but it would be necessary to get 
agreement from all the copyright holders.

In particular, a reasonable proportion of the code was developed by a 
company called "BrightStation" (or Muscat, or SmartLogik, depending on 
the exact date you pick) which began the development of Xapian (which 
was then called by a different name), but later pulled out.  I don't 
know who now owns the copyright on the code which was developed by them 
(I've heard conflicting claims) but in any case you'd be unlikely to be 
able to acquire a license.

The only way to get a non-GPL license therefore is to get agreement from 
as many developers as possible, and then to replace any pieces of code 
which are not owned by those developers with newly written code.  We 
have discussed this in the past, but it's not something that's going to 
happen overnight.  However, it could be a feasible project, if you were 
willing to wait long enough, and pay for enough developer time.  I'd 
guess it would be around 6 months work, but I could be way out (in 
either direction) - the first task would be to audit the code ownership 
and see how much actually needs doing.  I imagine that the developer 
time required to do that would cost several tens of thousands of pounds. 
  (Considerably less than the cost of developing something like Xapian 
from scratch, of course.)

We've been careful to keep all code history, and every source file in 
Xapian should contain details of all the people (or companies) which 
have held copyright on part of that file.  It would probably be 
necessary manually to go through the history of each file to determine 
how much of each copyright holder's code is still in the file, or had 
been replaced by later changes.


Speaking personally, I'd probably be willing to allow code I hold 
copyright on to be licensed under the LGPL, because this would allow the 
library to be used in quite a few more situations, but I'm not convinced 
that licensing it under a more permissive license than that would be 
good for the future of Xapian - I'd rather that any effort spent on 
making changes to Xapian was available to be merged into the main 
repository to improve Xapian.


See the "README" file, or http://xapian.org/history.php, for some of the 
corporate history which is relevant to this.

Also, note that I'm not a lawyer: I believe that legally if we replaced 
all the code owned by "BrightStation" with clearly original 
implementations, but left the overall design (and API) the same, you 
would be able to claim that BrightStation no longer owned any copyright 
on the code, but you'd need to check that with a lawyer very carefully.

-- 
Richard