So does anyone see a problem with the following possible ways of using ICU:
A. Including just the *.ucm files (and perhaps convtrs.txt) from ICU.
or
B. Including ".c" or compiled data files derived from same.
Is this a legal question?
If it's a legal question, you should ask Mark Davis from the Unicode
Consortium, and he can direct you to the best person to talk to. He may also
have general porting tips and ideas.
Mark's email is mark(_at_)macchiato(_dot_)com .
James.
Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
Ed Batutis <ebatutis(_at_)my-deja(_dot_)com> writes:
Hi,
I've corresponded with a lawyer type at IBM who's associated with the ICU
group. He seems to know what the issues are and what I'm talking about, at
least in general. Not a surprise: there is a license issue. It seem that it
would not be possible to distribute ICU as a part of the Perl distribution
because the licenses are not compatible. This doesn't seem to be an immutable
situation, necessarily. IBM has a process for assigning licenses to their
open
source projects and - in theory anyway - ICU's license could be changed. I'm
pursuing this.
This doesn't prevent Perl from incorporating calls into ICU. Perl calls into
totally closed proprietary libraries as it is (Windows for example) without
violating anything. ICU and Perl just can't be distributed together as one
thing at this point in time.
I've asked about using ICU in a limited fashion to generate Perl source
code.
(This seems pretty safe to me, but who knows.)
I'll post further information as soon as I have any.
=Ed
Having poked about some looking for good sources of easy to use tables
icu/data/*.ucm come out as 1st preference.
It is lacking in one or two tables (e.g. iso8859-1 is built in not a table,
- ours probably will be too - also seems to lack some other iso8859-*
and some I need for fonts).
The way these will be used by perl is they will be "compiled" into
a trie state machine by the Encode/compile script. My plan is to convert
tables ICU lacks to its .ucm format (which is close to but not identical
with the format used by Keld's tables on ftp.dkuug.dk).
--
Nick Ing-Simmons
