[OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[Grundy, Jim D]

One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
are made available.

The obvious choice here is the same license as the OCaml standard
libraries themselves (LGPL V2 + linking exception).  Except that this
isn't quite the same as the libraries distributed by INRIA.  For those
libraries companies have the option of joining the Caml Consortium, in
which case they may license the standard libraries under a more liberal
(for my intended meaning of the word) 4-clause BSD-like license, which
is probably more appealing to many corporations.  For example, you may
wish to consider if you would like ported versions of the libraries
released with F# and how the choice of license might make that possible
or not.  It may be worth investigating simply adopting a more liberal
(again, for my intended meaning of the word) BSD-like (3 clause version
perhaps) to  spur wider corporate adoption of the proposed standard.

Just something to think about.

Jim

--
Jim Grundy, Research Scientist. Intel Corporation, Strategic CAD Labs
Mail Stop RA2-451, 2501 NW 229th Ave, Hillsboro, OR 97124-5503, USA
Phone: +1 971 214-1709  Fax: +1 971 214-1771
Key Fingerprint: 5F8B 8EEC 9355 839C D777  4D42 404A 492A AEF6 15E2

Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[David Teller]

Do you wish to create a page on the OSR wiki on this subject ?

Cheers,
 David

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 10:17 -0800, Grundy, Jim D wrote:
> One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
> process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
> are made available.
> 
> The obvious choice here is the same license as the OCaml standard
> libraries themselves (LGPL V2 + linking exception).  Except that this
> isn't quite the same as the libraries distributed by INRIA.  For those
> libraries companies have the option of joining the Caml Consortium, in
> which case they may license the standard libraries under a more liberal
> (for my intended meaning of the word) 4-clause BSD-like license, which
> is probably more appealing to many corporations.  For example, you may
> wish to consider if you would like ported versions of the libraries
> released with F# and how the choice of license might make that possible
> or not.  It may be worth investigating simply adopting a more liberal
> (again, for my intended meaning of the word) BSD-like (3 clause version
> perhaps) to  spur wider corporate adoption of the proposed standard.
> 
> Just something to think about.
> 
> Jim
> 
> --
> Jim Grundy, Research Scientist. Intel Corporation, Strategic CAD Labs
> Mail Stop RA2-451, 2501 NW 229th Ave, Hillsboro, OR 97124-5503, USA
> Phone: +1 971 214-1709  Fax: +1 971 214-1771
> Key Fingerprint: 5F8B 8EEC 9355 839C D777  4D42 404A 492A AEF6 15E2
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management:
> http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list
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> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> 
-- 
David Teller
 Security of Distributed Systems
  http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller
 Angry researcher: French Universities need reforms, but the LRU act brings liquidations. 

Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[Eric Cooper]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 10:17:10AM -0800, Grundy, Jim D wrote:
> One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
> process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
> are made available.

This is the prerogative of the library author(s), not the
distribution.  The distribution might only accept and redistribute
software with a given license (a very bad idea, IMO), or suggest a
license to those authors who are on the fence, but in the end it's the
authors' choice.

And you can't reasonably expect an outside author to care about
providing preferential licensing to members of the Caml Consortium.

As a strawman, I'd suggest following the Debian Free Software
Guidelines ( http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines )

A final comment: I think (specialized) mailing lists, with archives,
are better for these kinds of discusion than Wikis.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u

Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[Edgar Friendly]

Grundy, Jim D wrote:
> One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
> process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
> are made available.
> 
> The obvious choice here is the same license as the OCaml standard
> libraries themselves (LGPL V2 + linking exception).  Except that this
> isn't quite the same as the libraries distributed by INRIA.  For those
> libraries companies have the option of joining the Caml Consortium, in
> which case they may license the standard libraries under a more liberal
> (for my intended meaning of the word) 4-clause BSD-like license, which
> is probably more appealing to many corporations.  For example, you may
> wish to consider if you would like ported versions of the libraries
> released with F# and how the choice of license might make that possible
> or not.  It may be worth investigating simply adopting a more liberal
> (again, for my intended meaning of the word) BSD-like (3 clause version
> perhaps) to  spur wider corporate adoption of the proposed standard.
> 
> Just something to think about.
> 
> Jim

You have an interesting point.  It seems quite reasonable that the
licensing of extensions to the OCaml stdlib have at least as permissive
license as LGPL V2 + linking exception.  For those (7?) companies in the
Caml Consortium, the difference comes down to... having to distribute
source to modifications to the extended stdlib if they distribute code
using those modifications.  (Correct me if I'm wrong on this, IANAL.)

I hear of most companies seriously using OCaml re-implementing their own
standard libraries anyway, and the "cost" of sharing some of their
improvements to community-developed extensions of stdlib seems quite
minor to me.  The easy workaround for these companies looks like not
modifying the extended stdlib, but to use their own stdlib replacements
(which they have license to) and to make the internal stdlib sufficient.

That said, I hope these companies will not adopt such an adversarial
relationship with the community developing an extended stdlib.  I hope
they contribute the gems of code they have in their internal stdlib to
the community one, and gain benefits themselves when others using the
community stdlib contribute their changes back to the community.

E.

Re: [Caml-list] [OSR] Suggested Topic - License

[Jim Miller]

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On Jan 29, 2008 1:17 PM, Grundy, Jim D <jim.d.grundy@intel.com> wrote:

> One issue to be considered in a an external library standardization
> process is the license under which libraries accepted to the standard
> are made available.
>
> The obvious choice here is the same license as the OCaml standard
> libraries themselves (LGPL V2 + linking exception).  Except that this
> isn't quite the same as the libraries distributed by INRIA.  For those
> libraries companies have the option of joining the Caml Consortium, in
> which case they may license the standard libraries under a more liberal
> (for my intended meaning of the word) 4-clause BSD-like license, which
> is probably more appealing to many corporations.  For example, you may
> wish to consider if you would like ported versions of the libraries
> released with F# and how the choice of license might make that possible
> or not.  It may be worth investigating simply adopting a more liberal
> (again, for my intended meaning of the word) BSD-like (3 clause version
> perhaps) to  spur wider corporate adoption of the proposed standard.
>
> Just something to think about.
>
>
I agree that this is an excellent point that needs to be seriously
considered.  I'm not saying that we need to limit people to the license that
they have to choose, I do think that for inclusion in the baseline, the
license should meet a set of minimum specific characteristics.  In the
community that I operate in, licenses are a very serious matter and there
are a tremendous number of packages that I cannot use for different projects
to do this.

At a minimum, the requirement MUST be that the license type and version is
specifically stated and that the requirements of the license are met by the
developer (i.e. GPL and LGPL require that each source file have wording and
a link to the license).

I believe this has a very direct tie into the evolving discussion on the
package management system that is going on.

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