It also creates issues for people wanting to contribute to the OCaml
manual on e.g. GitHub. It is not possible to create a pull request with
a change to the manual on any public platform because that would be
publishing without approval.

I think this view is exaggerated, as I don't think that the people who wrote this clause would consider hosting (modified) .etex files on a Github clone of the manual's repository as "distribution". To "distribute" the documentation or manual, I would at least expect a rendered (compiled) version of it. It is not necessary to distribute a rendered copy of the manual to contribute to it.

I'm not particularly fond of custom licenses either, but I don't think that they should be interpreted as making open-source contributions impossible.


On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 9:55 PM, Marek Kubica <marek@xivilization.net> wrote:
On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 14:44:05 +0100
Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr> wrote:

> The restriction on derivative works is very much intended.
>
> The license predates Creative Commons, but in CC terms it would be
> CC-BY-ND.

Non-derivative licenses like the custom one on the OCaml manual and
also CC-BY-ND create annoying edge cases. We've seen the case of
Debian and Fedora already. But reading the license:

> - Any translation or derivative work of the OCaml documentation and
>  user's manual must be approved by the authors in writing before
>  distribution.

It also creates issues for people wanting to contribute to the OCaml
manual on e.g. GitHub. It is not possible to create a pull request with
a change to the manual on any public platform because that would be
publishing without approval.

Kind regards,
Marek

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