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 WAA12923; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:12:46 +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 WAA12533 for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:12:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from e1.ny.us.ibm.com (e1.ny.us.ibm.com [32.97.182.101]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id fASLCir23076 for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:12:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from northrelay02.pok.ibm.com (northrelay02.pok.ibm.com [9.117.200.22]) by e1.ny.us.ibm.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA37956 for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 16:09:59 -0500 Received: from d01ml243.pok.ibm.com (d01ml243.pok.ibm.com [9.117.200.72]) by northrelay02.pok.ibm.com (8.11.1m3/NCO v5.01) with ESMTP id fASLCfT95338 for ; Wed, 28 Nov 2001 16:12:41 -0500 Importance: Normal To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] License Conditions for OCaml X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.0.3 (Intl) 21 March 2000 From: "John Field" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 15:29:40 -0500 X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on D01ML243/01/M/IBM(Build V509_11062001 |November 6, 2001) at 11/28/2001 04:12:41 PM, Serialize complete at 11/28/2001 04:12:41 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Xavier Leroy wrote: > Let me just state again what we'd like to achieve concerning the > licensing of the OCaml runtime and libraries: > > 1- Users can link with it, statically or dynamically, without any > restrictions on the final program. > 2- Users can modify the runtime or the libraries themselves, but then > must make their modifications public under the same conditions as > the original source. > 3- The license should be standard, OSI-approved, and well known to the > public that cares about these things. All of these look great to me. > Now the problem is that apparently there is no existing license that > matches these three criteria. The LGPL was chosen before we realized > all its implications w.r.t. static linking. But popular licenses such > as BSD or X don't meet criterion 2. Our current hope is that the LGPL > with a special exception to paragraph 6 saying "you can link with our > code any way you like" would fulfill all three requirements. This would certainly appear to meet the objections IBM's lawyers had. > > ... 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. > Clearly, we want to allow "modifications" to the OCaml code itself > (otherwise it's not open source), but not impose this requirement on > the user code. Are you saying that the LGPL is sufficiently ambiguous > not to distinguish clearly between library code and user code? No, I don't think the distinction between library and user code was ambiguous. The ambiguities I was referring to relate to the requirements imposed on implementers to accommodate re-linking, and to the rights it grants to users of the re-linked code. > As for "reverse engineering", I don't really care. If we void > paragraph 6 of the LGPL, the user isn't required to allow reverse > engineering. Still, commercial licenses that prevent reverse > engineering are silly -- here in the European Union (and in other > countries as well), reverse engineering is explicitly allowed by law > in certain circumstances, so putting such a provision in your license > is just calling for the whole license to be invalidated by a EU court. Personally, I agree that prohibitions on reverse-engineering are a waste of time. On the other hand, the lawyers seem to regard the LGPL clause that _explictly_ allows reverse-engineering as sort of an open-ended invitation to mischief. > > As a result of the issues above, IBM's general response to > > applications that use LGPL libraries is to require that the > > libraries be dynamically-linked. Since this wasn't feasible with > > OCaml, we had to distribute the application in bytecode, rather than > > opt-compiled form. > Suppose we remove the re-linking requirement. Would that be enough to > allow distribution of an ocamlopt-compiled executable in IBM's > lawyers' opinion? All of their objections were related to the re-linking requirement, so unless its removal somehow introduced new issues, I would _think_ that the result would be acceptable. > As I said above, the other standard licenses (e.g. BSD, X) don't offer > enough guarantees about the OCaml libraries and runtime themselves > remaining open source. FWIW, I will ask some of my colleagues who have more experience with open source licenses than I do to see if there might be any other licenses around (obviously not as commonly-used as the ones above) that avoid LGPL re-linking problem. -John John Field IBM T.J. Watson Research Center http://www.research.ibm.com/people/j/jfield ------------------- 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