Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml

["Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla" <sevillar@team.ph.inter.net>]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 11:30:56PM -0500, Patrick M Doane wrote:
>   "The LGPL puts no restrictions at all on programs linked with LGPL-ed
> libraries. Thus, users are free to distribute (or not) OCaml-generated
> binaries under whatever conditions they like."
> 

Yeah, this is a slightly misleading statement, unless the OCaml
development team has made a modification to the LGPL similar to what was
done for the Guile license, which is LGPL with one additional clause:
blanket linking is allowed for Guile. (OCaml dev team, is this also the
license under which the runtime exists?)

If you read the license, how it works is that if you link *dynamically*
with LGPLed libraries, there are no restrictions on the license of the
linking program.  That means you have to have a shared library version.
If you have a statically linked program, or on some system that doesn't
support shared libraries/DLL's, you are going to be in violation of the
lesser GPL by linking to the static versions of the library.

You do need to distribute source code for the OCaml runtime libraries
though, with any and all modifications you made to those libraries as
well (if any).  But you need not distribute source for those programs
which are linked dynamically to the runtime libraries.  That's why
programs like the Linux Yahoo! Messenger client can get away with
linking to a LGPLed library like GTK+ without revealing their source
code.

-- 
Rafael R. Sevilla <sevillar@team.ph.inter.net>   +63(2)   8177746 ext. 8311
Programmer, Inter.Net Philippines                +63(917) 4458925
http://dido.engr.internet.org.ph/                OpenPGP Key ID: 0x5CDA17D8
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