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

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:

> On Mon, Aug 23, 2004 at 11:12:52PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote:
>> On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 09:34:00 +0200 Sven Luther wrote:
>> 
>> > Notice that in the ocaml case, it is well possible that the additional
>> > licences is more near the BSD, since it allows for third party to make
>> > modifications under a more permisive licence than the LGPL/QPL duo.
>> >
>> > So, would a wording where QPL 3b is modified to say that it may be
>> > relicenced under the QPL and under a more permisive licence be
>> > acceptable ?
>> 
>> IMHO, it would not improve the modified-QPL freeness.
>
> Why not ? It would say : upstream can redistribute under the QPL and any other
> licence that is considered DFSG-Free, including the BSD licence.
>
> What do you find non-free in this ? 

It compels me to grant upstream a right which upstream will not grant
me.  If that were symmetric, I would not object to this under DFSG 3.

Depending on phrasing, I might still find it objectionable, but I'd
have to think long and hard about the differences between compelled
grant of license to recipients, compelled grant of license to a third
party, and compelled transmission of data.  The first is free, the
third is not, and the second... well, I'm really not sure.

>> It however would really improve the ocaml freeness, if ocaml itself were
>> dual-licensed under a 2-clause BSD license (or X11 or Expat or...)
>> besides the QPL. In that case Debian could choose to distribute
>> under the 2-clause BSD license (or X11 or...) and everyone could be
>> happy...
>
> Notice that the situation is not exactly the same. I didn't say the ocaml
> would be dual licenced, but that upstream has the right to distribute your
> changes under some random free licence, including the 2-clause BSD one, to the
> people they chose to. Not necessarily the world at large though.

But of course those people could distribute it further, under their
permissive license, right?  Because if they can't, then it's not free.
So this would at least allow somebody to buy and fork Ocaml into a
free-Ocaml and a QPL'd Ocaml.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu