Re: [Caml-list] Commercial application written in O'Caml: ExcelEverywhere

[Karl Zilles <zilles@1969.ws>]

Remi Vanicat wrote:
> Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org> writes:
>>On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 09:10:49PM +1000, skaller wrote:
>>
>>>Agree. Too many LGPL contributions, which I can't
>>>use in my open source project because it has a 
>>>public domain licence -- I *desire* to encourage
>>>commercial use of my code: the more users the better.
>>
>>Are you sure LGPL is a problem in this case? LGPL is a great
>>compromise license because you get the changes to your library back,
>>but commercial (and other) users can always use the library. I prefer
>>it over GPL most of the time.
> 
> 
> You need the special exception that you will find into the Objective
> Caml License, because LGPL only give you the right to link with non
> free only dynamically, and ocaml link statically.
> 

Well, you can link statically under the lgpl, but it's a pain in the 
ass, because you then have to

"Accompany the work with [...] the complete machine-readable "work that 
uses the Library", as object code and/or source code, so that the user 
can modify the Library and then relink to produce a modified executable 
containing the modified Library. (It is understood that the user who 
changes the contents of definitions files in the Library will not 
necessarily be able to recompile the application to use the modified 
definitions."

So you have to distribute your object files as well as your executable.
This is going to make your application a lot easier to reverse engineer, 
and saddles you with obligations that I'm not really happy with.

This is the clause that wasn't in precious versions of the LGPL, and is 
the one that the OCAML license throws out.



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