License question: tricky issue

[Alessandro Baretta <a.baretta@barettadeit.com>]

Would the authors/copyright holders consider a tarball containing an Ocaml 
source tarball plus other source code and other source tarballs as a 
distribution of their software or as a derived work? The question is tricky due 
to the non-free public license adopted by Inria originally.

I ask this question because I would like to release a source distribution for 
Ocaml containing all source tarballs and all patches needed to build a complete 
AS/Xcaml toolchain. This includes one or more stable ocaml tarballs, an 
ocaml-cvs directory (for testing purposes), a metaocaml tarball, and a quite a 
few libraries (findlib, pcre-ocaml, ocamlnet, pxp, extlib, postgres and a bunch 
more). If I understand the QPL correctly, should this project be considered a 
derived work I would not be allowed to distribute it; whereas, if it is 
considered a distribution, à la Debian, there should be no problem.

Notice that all modifications to other peoples code exist in my distribution in 
the form of patch files, which are automatically applied before the build 
process begins.

Alex


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