Hi all,
Here's the latest status on my license discussions with IBM in regard to ICU:
Assuming that license changes on ICU's side are not going to happen any time
soon - if ever - all is not lost. Far from it:
ICU and Perl can be packaged together like Linux distributions are put together
without a problem. Linux distributions of course contain many packages each
with their own unique licensing agreements. In fact, ICU is already part of
some commercial Linux distributions. If they were packaged together in this
way, when the user installs the ICU part of the distribution (thereby accepting
the ICU license agreement) Perl can access ICU's features without violating
either its own licenses or ICU's license. Perl will need to operate properly -
but with fewer features - without ICU to preserve the spirit if its own
licenses. But in the short to medium term this is required anyway. ICU won't
build everywhere Perl does.
My discussions with IBM in regard to license changes for ICU continue. I'd like
to see ICU relicensed under LGPL if possible. Also, I don't have an answer yet
regarding the use of the ICU UCM files to create Perl sources. Again I doubt
there will be a problem, but I think it is worthwhile checking before things go
too far.
Feel free to contact me for more details.
Regards,
=Ed
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