From: skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>
To: Jacques Garrigue <garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp>
Cc: caml-list@davidb.org, caml-list <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] licence stuff again
Date: 25 Oct 2004 15:56:05 +1000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1098683764.3075.190.camel@pelican.wigram> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20041025.123834.26988978.garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp>
On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 13:38, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> On the other hand, there should be no problem loading manually a
> GPL library in the toplevel, or building such a toplevel privately.
This may be so (you can surely do anything you like privately,
since licences based on Copyright only apply to redistribution).
However, it is a pain that legal matters interfere
with the technical design of software. The very same
program that is fine when you use dynamic linkage
may be be not fine when you statically link, for example.
The problem here is that we have a community of amateurs,
hobbyists, acadamics, and a couple of specialist commerical
companies and we all like different licences but don't
really care because either (a) we're not deriving income
from our effort, we're doing it for fun or academic
brownie points, and/or (b) our income is secure, and
we have no need to actually sell our product.
On the other hand the C++ community is mainly composed
of commerical programmers -- people making a living
out of cutting code. And even the vendors of libraries
and compilers have a vested interest in uniformity
both technical and legal. So right from the start,
Boost required software to be unencumbered, and now
there is a movement to formalise that with a single
licence.
So despite the inferior quality of the C++ platform,
C++ people have large benefit from free exchange of
reusable components which the Ocaml community continually
denies itself because everyone seems to have some pointless
political statement to make (including me :)
We're *never* going to agree on a common restrictive licence,
so there's only one possible way forward: an unrestrictive one.
Most Ocaml people have no reason to fear being generous --
they're not going to lose any income. The people with
most to lose -- commercial C++ programmers -- have shown
that being generous actually works. Everyone benefits.
--
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850,
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net
-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2004-10-25 5:56 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2004-10-24 9:03 [Caml-list] Announce: Schoca-0.2.3 released Christoph Bauer
2004-10-24 18:29 ` skaller
2004-10-25 2:58 ` David Brown
2004-10-25 3:38 ` Jacques Garrigue
2004-10-25 5:01 ` David Brown
2004-10-25 6:08 ` Jacques Garrigue
2004-10-25 6:40 ` skaller
2004-10-25 8:00 ` Ville-Pertti Keinonen
2004-10-25 14:35 ` Stefan Monnier
2004-10-25 15:15 ` [Caml-list] " skaller
2004-10-25 15:25 ` Stefan Monnier
2004-10-25 14:42 ` [Caml-list] " skaller
2004-10-25 15:52 ` David Brown
2004-10-25 18:10 ` Hartmann Schaffer
2004-10-25 5:56 ` skaller [this message]
2004-10-25 5:18 ` skaller
2004-10-25 5:29 ` David Brown
2004-10-25 6:07 ` skaller
2004-10-27 14:42 ` Sven Luther
2004-10-27 14:40 ` Sven Luther
2004-10-27 16:04 ` skaller
2004-10-27 17:46 ` David Brown
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=1098683764.3075.190.camel@pelican.wigram \
--to=skaller@users.sourceforge.net \
--cc=caml-list@davidb.org \
--cc=caml-list@inria.fr \
--cc=garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox