Welcome to Xapian!
==================

Xapian is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License.  You
should find a copy of the GNU General Public License in the file "COPYING"
in the top level of this distribution of Xapian.

See the file "INSTALL" for information on building and installing Xapian.
If you're wanting to modify Xapian itself, the contents of file "HACKING"
are recommended reading.

Xapian is derived from software originally developed by BrightStation plc under
the GPL as a replacement for their proprietary Muscat 3.6 Information Retrieval
library (which was written almost entirely in BCPL, and becoming hard to extend
in the ways they wanted).  The project was originally known as OpenMuscat and
later Omsee.  They sadly decided to take development closed-source.

A number of developers (including some former BrightStation employees) took the
last GPLed version and have been continuing development under the GPL.  This
project was initially known as OmSeek, but BrightStation complained this was
too close to their (untrademarked and unpublicised) name Omsee.  It was simpler
to change it than to argue, and the name Xapian was chosen.

The last numbered BrightStation release was OpenMuscat 0.4.1, although there
was extensive development in CVS after that.  The first official Xapian release
was 0.5.0.

You can find downloads, mailing lists, SVN access, and other useful resources
on the Xapian website:

http://www.xapian.org/
