Thread: Re: [Snowball-discuss] Snowball release cycle ?
Grant, I'm originator of this thread and PostgreSQL is also a big user of the Snowball project, so we also are very interested in the vital activity of the project. However, I see issue with license, which is currently BSD and this allows us to use snowball in PostgreSQL (which is also BSD licensed). Is't possible to preserve BSD license under Apache Software Foundation ? Another question is not about snowball compiler, but about specific stemmers, which contributed by people. Are you willing also to support this activity ? I'm crossposting also to the -hackers discussion list of the PostgreSQL project. Oleg On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, Grant Ingersoll wrote: > Forwarding a private message I sent to Dr. Porter to the list as a whole as a > possible way of addressing Dr. Porter's desire to code less and also the > desire for releases, etc. Dr. Porter's response was that I should bring it > up within the community to gauge other's interest, so here it is: > <snip> > Hi Dr. Porter, > > My name is Grant Ingersoll and I am a committer on the Apache Lucene project > (http://lucene.apache.org), which is a big user of the Snowball code. In > reading this message and hearing of your desire not to code anymore, it > occurred to me that maybe the Snowball project would be interested in > becoming a part of the Apache Software Foundation, whereby it can get > attention from a community of developers/committers. For instance, just the > other day, I was thinking about a performance improvement that we could use > in Lucene land that would allow passing in a char [] array instead of a > String to the stemmer, since all of our Token objects are represented that > way and it now forces us to construct a new String every time. > > If you're interested, let me know and we can figure out where to go from > here. The donation process for projects outside of the ASF is pretty easy > and I would propose that it become a sub-project of the Lucene project, so > you can know it will be in good hands. Naturally, you and Richard would also > be committers on the project, so you could still be involved as much as you > like. > > At any rate, thanks for the great piece of software. > > Cheers, > Grant Ingersoll > </snip> > > So, what do others think about donating the Snowball stemmers to the ASF and > in particular the Lucene project? Snowball would likely be a subproject of > Lucene (like Solr, Mahout, etc.) and people could contribute patches, become > committers, etc. just as any other ASF project, i.e. based on merit. > > -Grant > > > On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Martin Porter wrote: > >> >> Oleg, >> >> Hello, nice to hear from you you again, after so long. Richard and I have >> discussed the idea of having a proper release policy from time to time, but >> have never managed to put one in place. I think that is acceptable, since >> snowball changes less and less as the years go by. (I am 65 now, and want >> to >> withdraw from software work in the future.) >> >> As well as the snowball compiler, I have no plans to alter the stemmers >> themselves (except perhaps the English stemmer -- I have thought of undoing >> or modifying an earlier extension.) The version we're currently releasing >> is >> just as stable as the one you used in 2007, and probably little different. > > Regards, Oleg _____________________________________________________________ Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru), Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia Internet: oleg@sai.msu.su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/ phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83
On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote: > No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no? > (caveat: IANAL) i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just > don't take credit for it. Everything I've read says the two are > completely compatible As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to the FSF. This would be a showstopper problem for me. -- Richard
Richard Boulton wrote: > On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote: > >> No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no? >> (caveat: IANAL) i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just >> don't take credit for it. Everything I've read says the two are >> completely compatible >> > > As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to > the FSF. This would be a showstopper problem for me. > > Er, what does Postgres have that is covered by GPL2? cheers andrew
>>> Richard Boulton <richard@lemurconsulting.com> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:10:01PM -0400, Grant Ingersoll wrote: >> No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no? >> (caveat: IANAL) i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just >> don't take credit for it. Everything I've read says the two are >> completely compatible > > As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to > the FSF. This would be a showstopper problem for me. Where does GPL come into it? (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for either product.) -Kevin
On Apr 1, 2009, at 4:51 PM, Oleg Bartunov wrote: > Grant, > > I'm originator of this thread and PostgreSQL is also a big user of the > Snowball project, so we also are very interested in the vital > activity of the project. However, I see issue with license, which is > currently BSD and this allows us to use snowball in PostgreSQL (which > is also BSD licensed). Is't possible to preserve BSD license under > Apache Software Foundation ? No, it would have to be ASL 2, but that is pretty similar to BSD, no? (caveat: IANAL) i.e non-viral, free to use however you want, just don't take credit for it. Everything I've read says the two are completely compatible > > > Another question is not about snowball compiler, but about specific > stemmers, which contributed by people. Are you willing also to > support this activity ? ASF is all about community, so the community would be responsible for supporting the activity of the project. Obviously, Dr. Porter and Richard would need to be involved, but one goal of the ASF is that any healthy project should be able to survive the loss of a committer. The way the ASF works, people who contribute a lot would become committers, etc., so yeah, I think the answer is yes. It is a fairly well defined process for doing this. i.e. if you contribute a lot, the other committers would nominate you to become a committer. You can read more about how the ASF works at www.apache.org/ HTH, Grant
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> wrote: > Where does GPL come into it? (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for > either product.) Richard is one of the developers of Snowball so he might want to keep its license compatible with GPL2. Moreover, Snowball is used by a lot of projects, and probably some of them are GPL2. Note that ASL2 is however compatible with GPL3. -- Guillaume
"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> writes:
> Where does GPL come into it? (I hadn't seen that mentioned before for
> either product.)
Keep in mind that you're seeing some fraction of the discussion on
snowball-discuss (whatever is from people also subscribed to
pgsql-hackers; everything else is stuck in the moderation queue).
I would imagine the GPL complaint is from someone who's using the
snowball code in a GPL project.
However, from a Postgres point of view, I'm not sure that we'd be
totally happy with ASL either. We'd certainly have to stop bundling
the snowball code in the Postgres distribution, as we do now. Or more
likely, freeze it at the last BSD-licensed release.
regards, tom lane
On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 05:41:53PM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote: > Richard Boulton wrote: >> As I understand it, ASL 2 is incompatible with GPL 2, at least according to >> the FSF. This would be a showstopper problem for me. > > Er, what does Postgres have that is covered by GPL2? I think cross posting has confused this thread - I was talking about snowball not postgres. I don't use postgres at all; in fact, I'm not sure why this thread was copied to pgsql-hackers at all - sorry for the noise if there wasn't a good reason. What I mean is that I use snowball in a project which is GPL-2, and cannot be relicensed, and snowball changing to ASL 2 would be a showstopper problem for me for that reason. -- Richard