Baloo Framework - License Exception

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Sunday 14 December 2014 00:33:20 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Dimarts, 9 de desembre de 2014, a les 15:22:15, Vishesh Handa va 
escriure:
> > Hey guys
> > 
> > I would like to promote Baloo to be a framework for 5.6.
> > 
> > All of Baloo's code is LGPL, however, we internally use Xapian as a full
> > text index (GPL). This would make Baloo GPL. Could we have an exception
> > for
> > now?
> 
> I don't think you need an exception.
> 
> See https://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
> 
> It says "Source files that are part of a library with a public API must be
> licensed .... LGPL ...."
> 
> As far as I understand that is correct for Baloo, right?
> 
> 
> And I don't think it makes Baloo GPL.
> 
> Baloo is still LGPL, when you aggregate it current Xapian code the result
> becomes GPL, but I could write something different with the same header
> interface as Xapian and make it LGPL, and then the aggregation would be
> LGPL. (Or maybe not, not sure what was the result on that lawsuit saying
> that APIs were copyrightable or not, i guess we could always white-room it
> :D)
> 
> Does what am I saying make any kind of sense?

I think Jonathan should respond to it. Your argumentation makes sense to me, 
but the question is whether Baloo is currently derived work of Xapian or not. 
If there is baloo internal an abstraction allowing to easily swap out Xapian 
by something different I would say it's not derived work. But if Xapian is 
deeply wired into Baloo I would say it's derived work.

Cheers
Martin

> 
> Cheers,
>   Albert
> 
> > We have been looking into alternatives since we have a rather large share
> > of problems with Xapian [1]. But this will take time, I'm not too keen on
> > switching to something on a whim without proper testing. Plus, it would be
> > a substantially large change.
> 
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