From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id CAA16433; Thu, 29 Nov 2001 02:25:19 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA16440 for ; Thu, 29 Nov 2001 02:25:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from wetware.wetware.com (wetware.wetware.com [199.108.16.1]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id fAT1PHv13138 for ; Thu, 29 Nov 2001 02:25:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from (locally authorised broken client using invalid hostname!) localhost([208.177.152.18]) (3276 bytes) by wetware.wetware.com via sendmail with P:esmtp/R:bind_hosts/T:inet_zone_bind_smtp (sender: ) id for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 17:25:15 -0800 (PST) (Smail-3.2.0.114 2001-Aug-6 #1 built 2001-Nov-28) Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 17:25:23 -0800 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v475) From: james woodyatt To: The Trade Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: Message-Id: X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.475) Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Wednesday, November 28, 2001, at 12:29 , John Field wrote: > Xavier Leroy wrote: >> >> Let me just state again what we'd like to achieve concerning the >> licensing of the OCaml runtime and libraries: >> >> 1- Users can link with it, statically or dynamically, without any >> restrictions on the final program. >> 2- Users can modify the runtime or the libraries themselves, but then >> must make their modifications public under the same conditions as >> the original source. >> 3- The license should be standard, OSI-approved, and well known to the >> public that cares about these things. > > All of these look great to me. > >> As I said above, the other standard licenses (e.g. BSD, X) don't offer >> enough guarantees about the OCaml libraries and runtime themselves >> remaining open source. > > FWIW, I will ask some of my colleagues who have more experience with > open source licenses than I do to see if there might be any other > licenses around (obviously not as commonly-used as the ones above) > that avoid LGPL re-linking problem. There are many to choose from, but all of them will place some restrictions on the user executables developed with the covered code. Whether you think those restrictions are insignificant or desirable in some way, is a matter to be resolved. The two licenses that spring to mind most readily to me are the Artistic License, and the Apple Public Source License. Both of them would require tweaking to INRIA's purposes, but I think either one could easily be made to work, depending on how you wanted to trade off between protecting INRIA's investment and protecting users' freedoms. They're both meet the OSI definition, and *generally* do what you want in 1 and 2. These licenses are just the ones I'm most familiar with (aside from the BSD, MIT and GPL licenses), because 1) I'm a long time Perl hacker (gave it up mostly for Caml); and, 2) I'm a Macintosh user and an Apple developer. (Perhaps, I should also disclose that I work for Apple Computer, but my work there does not involve Caml...) Anyway, it sounds like you're looking for a license that would be compatible with the APSL, i.e. it would permit OCaml to be integrated into the Darwin distribution, should that ever seem like a good idea to the people who manage that sort of thing. As a personal matter, I would like to see that happen someday. Good luck sorting out the license issue. -- j h woodyatt "...the antidote to misinformation is more information, not less." --vinton cerf ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr