Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml

[YAMAGATA yoriyuki <yoriyuki@ms.u-tokyo.ac.jp>]

I am not a member of the ocaml team also, nor the participants of
discussion you saw, but since I am planning to distribute something
under LGPL, how LGPL is interpreted is my concern.  So I would like to
add a point to Sven's summary.  (Sorry, I guess you are very busy, but
you may be concerned with interpretation of LGPL too.)

Many of the discussion you saw, is, it seems for me, related to
alleged ambiguity of the statement "provided that the terms permit
modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse
engineering for debugging such modifications" in the beginning of the
section 6. of LGPL.  People are afraid that, in the end, this clause
forces developer to provide the source of their "work that uses the
Library", or something making reverse engineering easy (like unstriped
executable.)

How IBM lawyers think about this problem, is reported in
    http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200111/msg00440.html
as

From: "John Field" <jfield@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2001 14:10:12 -0500

> IBM's lawyers have lots of experience dissecting the innards of
> various open- and quasi-open source licenses.  They are _very_ wary
> of the LGPL.  I won't attempt to explain or justify all of
> their concerns, some of which I don't fully understand.  However,
> their principal objections were to the clauses of the LGPL allowing
> "reverse engineering" of and "modifications" to the code.  The lawyers
> realize that the _intent_ of these clauses is probably benign.  However,
> the license provisions are so ambiguously worded (as ample discussion
> on this list has demonstrated) that the requirements it imposes on an
> implementer and the rights it grants to a user are very unclear.

May I ask you to clarify this problem?  Is it FAQ?

--
YAMAGATA, yoriyuki (doctoral student)
Department of Mathematical Science, University of Tokyo.
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