Hi Guys, Thanks Thilo, Bertrand and Jukka for chiming in. I'm not exactly sure how to proceed either since I'm better at developing code than sorting out legal issues :)
I can only speak from my analogous experience within Nutch here in which the Eclipse.org DTD format, more or less, is the basis of the (near-equivalent) Nutch plugin.xml format. Nutch has its own plugin.dtd (that I helped to draft, along with Jerome CHarron), based on the Nutch plugin system developed primarily by Stefan Groschupf. Essentially, Stefan developed a set of code to interpret plugin.xml files, and do things with their data (process it, reformat it, make it available, etc.) to other Nutch subsystems. This entire code base was developed specifically for Nutch. The only thing that was reused was the plugin DTD's "model" (perhaps modulo an attribute field or two in one of the tags). Here, we have a very similar case. Jerome Charron has clearly used the shared mime-info DTD format from freedesktop.org as the "data model" for his mime type db format. However, the entire code-base that reads, interprets, reformats, and processes the information made available by the mime type database, was written by Jerome. Also, I'm not sure that Jerome's mime DTD (and associated mime XML format) provided in TIKA-6 doesn't add some new capability (e.g., I notice that the Nutch mimes are in this new mime db as well) that was not present in the freedesktop.org original one. So, to me, and mind you, I have pretty much 0% experience interpreting OS licenses, etc., as well as interpreting law :), this is an equivalent, and acceptable case here. I guess what it really boils down to is IP on a "data model". For instance, must any mime databases developed in the future that contain at least the shared mime-info database data elements defined in the DTD as a subset of their information, restricted to being GPL? I would be scared/shocked if the answer to that is "yes". To me, it's hard to slap IP issues onto a "data model". If that were the case, wouldn't any software developed for an ISO data model standard (e.g., ISO-11179) be required to adopt whatever the license is that the 11179 model standards body decided? My 2 cents, Chris On 9/20/07 9:27 AM, "Bertrand Delacretaz (JIRA)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [ > https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-6?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.sy > stem.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#action_12529143 ] > > Bertrand Delacretaz commented on TIKA-6: > ---------------------------------------- > > Chris suggests (on the dev list): > >> ...I propose >> that we remove the file freedesktop.org.xml, and then rename the DTD file >> from freedesktop.org.dtd to mime.types.dtd.... > > If that DTD file was part of the freedesktop package, this would not be ok > IMHO, as the whole package is covered by the GPL license. > > OTOH, if the DTD was "independently created", reusing the same data model for > our mime-type database is probably ok (do we want to confirm this?) > > Sorry to be picky about that, but there were some interesting discussions > about similar cases at the ASF recently [1], and I much prefer to write code > than having to handle stuff like this ;-) > > [1] > http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200708.mbox/browser > >> Port Nutch (or better) MimeType detection system into Tika >> ---------------------------------------------------------- >> >> Key: TIKA-6 >> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TIKA-6 >> Project: Tika >> Issue Type: New Feature >> Components: general >> Affects Versions: 0.1-incubator >> Environment: Improvement is indep. of environment >> Reporter: Chris A. Mattmann >> Assignee: Chris A. Mattmann >> Fix For: 0.1-incubator >> >> Attachments: TIKA-6.Mattmann.091907.patch.txt >> >> >> This patch will contribute a MimeType detection system for Tika, including >> MImeType data structure, and associated content-detection facilities. This >> will be based on Nutch's MimeType system as a baseline, however, I'm open to >> suggestions. Jerome Charron mentioned that he had an implementation of a >> MimeType system based on FreeDesktop.org's system. We should look into this >> as well. ______________________________________________ Chris Mattmann, Ph.D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cognizant Development Engineer Early Detection Research Network Project _________________________________________________ Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA Office: 171-266B Mailstop: 171-246 _______________________________________________________ Disclaimer: The opinions presented within are my own and do not reflect those of either NASA, JPL, or the California Institute of Technology.
