Hi,

On Mar 23, 2008, at 17:38 , Søren Hilmer wrote:
> Hi
>
> Took a quick look at Sphinx, and noticed that it licensed under GPL  
> v.2. That
> is probably a problem for integration into CouchDB, as it is not  
> compatiple
> with Apache v.2.
>
> see: http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

I am not lawyer but from how I understand it, we do not "link" binaries
here and CouchDB is not entirely dependent on Sphinx. I know of a
few commercial GUIs to GPLed code (XTorrent, Rouge Amoeba's
programmes etc.) that use stdio to bridge GPL and non-GPL code
bases. From what I understand that is considered "legal" and we
are doing the same thing. So I think we can integrate Sphinx with
CouchDB. The code that uses the Sphinx API directly, that is the
Indexer and the Searcher would need to be under GPL though and
could not be distributed with CouchDB.

Cheers
Jan
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