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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