Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Suggested Topic - License

["Jim Miller" <gordon.j.miller@gmail.com>]

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On Jan 29, 2008 1:17 PM, Grundy, Jim D <jim.d.grundy@intel.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
I agree that this is an excellent point that needs to be seriously
considered.  I'm not saying that we need to limit people to the license that
they have to choose, I do think that for inclusion in the baseline, the
license should meet a set of minimum specific characteristics.  In the
community that I operate in, licenses are a very serious matter and there
are a tremendous number of packages that I cannot use for different projects
to do this.

At a minimum, the requirement MUST be that the license type and version is
specifically stated and that the requirements of the license are met by the
developer (i.e. GPL and LGPL require that each source file have wording and
a link to the license).

I believe this has a very direct tie into the evolving discussion on the
package management system that is going on.

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