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Re: NEW ocaml licence proposal by upstream, will be part of the 3.08.1 release going into sarge.



David Nusinow <david_nusinow@verizon.net> writes:

> On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 12:09:01PM -0400, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
>> Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>> 
>> > Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> >> Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>> >>> Why is granting of extra freedoms non-free?
>> >> 
>> >> It isn't.  The part of my message that you snipped made clear that
>> >> it's the requirement that I must grant extra permissions which is
>> >> non-free.
>> >
>> > What is the difference between granting of extra permissions and
>> > granting of extra freedoms?
>> 
>> Nothing.  Therefore, I require you to grant me a permissive license to
>> all code you have ever written.
>> 
>> Oh wait, that doesn't seem free to you?  Why?  Because it's a
>> requirement.  What's the difference between charity and tax?  Tax is a
>> requirement, charity is freely given.
>
> That's not a fair example because all the code he has ever written is not a
> derived work from the licensed code. Just because there are requirements of
> people receiving the license to give up something does not make it non-free.

Neither is all of the code used to modify a QPL'd work a derivative of
the licensed code.  If I take some spiffy-keen code written elsewhere
and write some shims to cram it into the OCaml compiler, it's a
modification, but what I wrote before I ever saw OCaml is not a
derivative work.  The whole program taken together is, but I never
distribute that because I can only distribute source as patches.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu



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