From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA21530 for caml-redistribution; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:57:56 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA09132 for ; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:53:27 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA19876; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:53:19 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA26061; Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:53:18 +0200 (MET DST) From: Pierre Weis Message-Id: <199904191753.TAA26061@pauillac.inria.fr> Subject: Re: licence issues To: bpr@best.com (Brian Rogoff) Date: Mon, 19 Apr 1999 19:53:18 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: caml-list@inria.fr In-Reply-To: from "Brian Rogoff" at Apr 16, 99 09:41:41 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: weis > On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Markus Mottl wrote: > > Hello, > > > > at the moment there is a thread on "comp.lang.functional" discussing > > legal aspects of the OCAML-distribution policy. > > > > Some people believe it is too restrictive and they thus rule it out for > > their purposes. But I think this is mainly due to misunderstandings of > > the licence and/or that the licence is not always explicit enough. > > I've heard this question asked too by other "open source" advocates, and > I'd also be interested in the answer. As Markus notes, it would be a > real pity if confusion over the licensing issue precludes greater use of > this outstanding tool. You are right, but you know, nowadays, it's a kind of a religious war: you must have been baptized under the GPL to be declared a ``free'' man (sorry, I meant software). This is not so simple, since the GPL is not a silver bullet, it is not that clear and not that handy, particularly if you want to distribute your software in a large circle, even away from the academic areas. It's so clear that the Gnu team has been obliged to design a new licence devoted to libraries. But people that have not spent several hours to carefully study the GPL and try to find out its meaning, are absolutely sure that it is very simple and clear: in short, the GPL is ``the definition'' of free software. With this axiom in mind, everything is simple to explain and state: GPL = free software (good), and conversely non GPL = non free software (bad). So, if your licence is the GPL you belong to the free software (upper) class, otherwise you're not free and thus you are suspected of something (may be you plan to try to exploit somebody somewhere ?), at least it is true that you can be suspected to suspect the GPL as not being ``the licence''! Let me state a few points about the ``freeness'' and ``openness'' of Objective Caml, without the above axioms in mind. First, our software is completely free in the sense ``free of charges'': so free of charges that you can freely get its CD-ROM, just writing a letter to INRIA with your name and adress (see http://pauillac.inria.fr/caml/FAQ/general-eng.html for details). This way, anybody can easily get the compiler even though he or she is living in a country that is not well connected to the internet, or just possesses a slow modem to browse the WEB. This free distribution of the compiler is kindly offered by INRIA and the french government. Second, Objective Caml's licence is a free licence in the common sense: you can use the compiler as you like, you can redistribute it as you like, you can read and modify the sources of the compiler as you like. You can redistribute your modified sources of our compiler, provided you let us easily prove that your modified software is based on Objective Caml (and the simplest way for you and for us is that you distribute patches that clearly identify what is your work and what is our work). To consider this licence as being restrictive, compared to any commercial licence (including comparison with Microsoft's ``free software'' notion) is just a joke or a useless flame. If this licence is not suitable to somebody, I suppose that the following clause is the problem: you cannot redistribute binaries built from modified sources of the compiler. In fact, except the one discussed below, I don't see any strong reason to bypass the application of this clause, except if ``somebody'' wants to distribute our compiler or part of our compiler, without clearly mentioning that ``somebody'''s software is based on Objective Caml. This would be a problem if these modified sources are redistributed as if they were those of the original compiler (for bug reports for instance), or evidently if no mention of the original sources are made. That's exactly to avoid these kind of unfair behaviours that this clause has been added to the copyright. Otherwise, this clause just prevents you from distributing binaries containing the compiler. If you want to do so, you must ask INRIA, just to make it clear that we know what you've done and you know that we know and that your job doesn't hurt ours. It has to be mentioned that there is no known example of somebody asking a dispensation for a fair reason and getting a refusal from INRIA. > On a related note, the article http://caml.inria.fr/ercim.html discusses > the creation of a "Caml Consortium". Is this still happening? Yes, this is work in progress, and this licensing matter clearly has to be re-examined at this occasion. Best regards, Pierre Weis INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/