Re: legal archeology : ocaml bignum is non-free, is the licence enough to go into non-free ?
On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 07:18:32PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>
>
> > 1) the code is indeed non-free, and the copyright holder are the INRIA
> > (which is willing to relicence it, no problem there),
>
> Not related to ocaml, but who at INRIA have you been speaking with
The ocaml team. Xavier Leroy and Pierre Weiss.
> about this? The Moscow ML runtime is also encumbered with an old
> non-free INRIA licence, which a group of users have been trying to do
> something about for years, without luck.
This is a well known problem, Moscow ML is built on top of caml-light,
which was the precursor of ocaml, still used in exams to enter french
ingenieur's schools. I have been in discussion with Piere Weiss about a
freeing of the caml-light code, so i can provide a debian package for
it, but this has not given anything, more due to lack of time or such.
caml-light (and thus perhaps also moscow ml) is also touched by the
bignum licence problem.
> > the something (forgot the english name sorry) in the haystack. But in
>
> Needle.
Thanks, i had it on the point of my tongue, and then couldn't find it
back.
> > BTW, what are the legal implications of distributing it via
> > snapshot.debian.net, and the older debian releases ?
>
> If the problem is purely a DFSG problem, not distributability,
> then there should be no *legal* implications of keeping snapshots
> of the old packages. The rest of the ocaml library is supposed to
> be LGPL, so there wouldn't be any license incompatibilty to render the
Well, LGPL for runtime, yes. The rest is QPL i think. In fact i believe
the licence is a LGPL + excemption for static binaries, like the libgcc
or something such, as suggested by rms a year or two ago.
> combined package undistributable.
Ok.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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