Which linuxen does ICU come bundled with?
My personal opinion is that IBM will want ICU to be
made as pervasive as Unicode itself is, and over time
will adjust their licence to accomplish that. Especially
if ICU is being distributed with Linux, now a focal point
at IBM.
It doesn't help IBM to force the development of a 'free'
clone of their own nearly free library.
James.
Ed Batutis wrote:
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
