[OSR] Suggested Topic - License

["Grundy, Jim D" <jim.d.grundy@intel.com>]

One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
are made available.

The obvious choice here is the same license as the OCaml standard
libraries themselves (LGPL V2 + linking exception).  Except that this
isn't quite the same as the libraries distributed by INRIA.  For those
libraries companies have the option of joining the Caml Consortium, in
which case they may license the standard libraries under a more liberal
(for my intended meaning of the word) 4-clause BSD-like license, which
is probably more appealing to many corporations.  For example, you may
wish to consider if you would like ported versions of the libraries
released with F# and how the choice of license might make that possible
or not.  It may be worth investigating simply adopting a more liberal
(again, for my intended meaning of the word) BSD-like (3 clause version
perhaps) to  spur wider corporate adoption of the proposed standard.

Just something to think about.

Jim

--
Jim Grundy, Research Scientist. Intel Corporation, Strategic CAD Labs
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