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From: Jan Lehnardt <jan@apache.org>
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Subject: Re: Sphinx license
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:38:22 -0400
References: <200803232238.06748.sh@widetrail.dk>
 <47EAC55F.4060908@naderman.de> <47EAC7A9.3070201@apache.org>

Hi John,
On Mar 26, 2008, at 18:01 , Daniel John Debrunner wrote:
>> Hi,
>> unfortunately Sphinx doesn't make it very clear but it's released  
>> under
>> "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later
>> version." (as you can read in doc/Sphinx.html under 1.4 License) so  
>> you
>> can just apply the terms of GPLv3 and you should be fine even if it
>> required linking somewhere.
>
> I don't think the issue is that GPLv2 is incompatible with the ALv2,  
> it's that the ASF only distributes software using ALv2. If couchdb  
> pulls in Sphinx then won't that make the combined program also GPL?

Quoting one of my earlier mails to this thread:

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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