I am a newbie here and am unable to offer any views on the significance of the license situation, but it was the intention of Steve Morse and Alexander Beider to offer their algorithm to the wider developer world and so I am not sure why they would not be willing to re-licence the code to the Apache Software Foundation.
I am in contact with both guys having worked with them for many years so if you point me to any relevant Apache Software Foundation License documentation and explain exactly what is needed I will be happy to send it to them, discuss with them, and hopefully get this sorted as quickly as possible. Michael -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Neidhart [mailto:thomas.neidh...@gmail.com] Sent: 11 June 2014 12:56 To: Commons Developers List Subject: Re: [CODEC] Beider Morse Phonetic Matching Bug and questions Hi, as already commented on https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CODEC-187 the problem is related to some wrongly ported rule files from the original source. This otoh, creates a serious problem for us, as it looks like that the Beider-Morse phonetic matching encoder in commons-codec is derived work from a php codebase released under the GPLv3 licence. The original codebase is available at http://stevemorse.org/phoneticinfo.htm. While investigating the bug and comparing our rule file with the ones from the origina codebase it is quite clear that at least these are identical. The author of the patch (see https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CODEC-125) ported the code and applied the Apache license, but the license of the original codebase was never considered or discussed. This is quite serious I guess, as we have already released the code. We can ask the original authors to re-license their code to the Apache Software Foundation under a compatible license, but I wonder if they are willing to do so. This encoder is also used a lot in lucene/solr so it might have even larger implications. Any ideas how to proceed or if a re-licensing would be sufficient in this case? Thomas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
