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 RAA05883; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:22:12 +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 RAA05878 for ; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:22:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from earth.cs.mu.oz.au (earth.cs.mu.OZ.AU [128.250.37.146]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fAQGM9X15552 for ; Mon, 26 Nov 2001 17:22:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from fjh by earth.cs.mu.oz.au with local (Exim 3.32 #1 (Debian)) id 168OW7-0007cm-00; Tue, 27 Nov 2001 03:21:59 +1100 Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 03:21:58 +1100 From: Fergus Henderson To: Patrick M Doane Cc: Sven , caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml Message-ID: <20011127032158.C10358@earth.cs.mu.oz.au> References: <20011109095943.A8267@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> <20011109100719.J80907-100000@fledge.watson.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20011109100719.J80907-100000@fledge.watson.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.22i Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On 09-Nov-2001, Patrick M Doane wrote: > On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Sven wrote: > > > On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 11:30:56PM -0500, Patrick M Doane wrote: > > > > No, the worse that happens is that you must distribute the .cmo, .cmi, .cmx, > > and possibly .o, hopefully with a working makefile, but this last one is not > > demanded. > > As mentioned before - I don't think this is true. The LGPL is very clear > that the user must be able to modify the work (i.e. the application and > not the library). This is not possible to do with .cm[iox] files. The LGPL says that the derived work must be licensed under terms which "permit" the user to modify the work. "permit" does not mean the same thing as "make possible", and it definitely does not mean the same thing as "make easy"! It is in fact *possible* to modify the application given just the binary files, of course, just not *easy*. > 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. > It is standard practice to strip an executable of all symbols to prevent > users from snooping around in the code. Even if all I had to do was > include object files, the names of identifiers would still be intact. 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. -- Fergus Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit The University of Melbourne | of excellence is a lethal habit" WWW: | -- the last words of T. S. Garp. ------------------- 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