[Xapian-discuss] commercial license

[James Aylett]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 12:21:56PM +0100, Olivier Ricordeau wrote:

> My company is looking for a search engine for a proprietary product. 
> Xapian is released under the terms of the GPL, which is a problem for 
> us. So I was wondering if it would be possible to buy a commercial 
> license (a license which would enable us to sell the software without 
> making it GPL) for Xapian.

Olivier - I'm afraid this isn't straightforward. See
<http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/FAQ/CommercialLicence> for more
details. In brief: it's not possible right now, but if you were
prepared to sponsor the development work required, it "is probably a
feasible project".

Alternatively, you might want to consider a client-server arrangement,
where the server would be GPL but the client (and hence any part of
your code that used the client code) could be under any license you
chose (if you wrote it yourself; if you adopted someone else's, then
whatever license they had chosen).

J

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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org