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 RAA06490; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:48:04 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA06486 for ; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:48:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from fledge.watson.org (fledge.watson.org [204.156.12.50]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fAQGm1128292 for ; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:48:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from localhost (patrick@localhost) by fledge.watson.org (8.11.6/8.11.5) with ESMTP id fAQGlff93343; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 11:47:41 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from patrick@watson.org) Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 11:47:41 -0500 (EST) From: Patrick M Doane To: Fergus Henderson cc: Sven , Subject: Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml In-Reply-To: <20011127032158.C10358@earth.cs.mu.oz.au> Message-ID: <20011126113627.G92700-100000@fledge.watson.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Fergus Henderson wrote: > > Also, I still must permit users to reverse engineer my application. > > Yes, that's correct. You must give users the legal permission to reverse > engineer your application. However, you are under no obligation to make > it easy. Okay, true enough. There is some loss of legal action a company can take, but it is probably fine. > For C code, you can through various techniques (such as `ld -r' > and the `--retain-symbols-file' options of GNU ld) link your object > files into a single object file and strip out all of the symbols except > those undefined symbols that refer to the LGPL'd library or libraries > that you are linking with. These techniques can also be used with other > programming language implementations that generate standard object files, > such as (my favourite example ;) Mercury. > > I don't know if this is possible for Ocaml code, but if it is not, then > I think it might perhaps be more useful to ask for similar technical > features, rather than complaining about the license. There are many ways to address the issue and this could be good functionality to have. However, it's a lot less work to change the license and let developers simply strip the binaries after compilation. I brought up the topic of licensing as a status update. Xavier has said in the past that the conditions in the LGPL are silly and I agree with him. He also indicated that they would be looking into modifications in the future. My intent was not to start a flamewar on license issues, although they can be very hard to avoid with such a topic! Patrick ------------------- 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