Re: ocaml, QPL and the DFSG: New ocaml licence proposal.
On Fri, Jul 30, 2004 at 07:48:17PM +0200, Sven Luther wrote:
> Moreover, we need these licenses to be recognized as open-source by
> Debian and other authorities before even considering to use them.
The problem you are going to end up with for this, though, is that there is
no authoritative English version of the licences. The translation of the
CECILL licence we've seen so far was non-authoritative, and hence no actual
decision can be made about it's freeness. Most of the organisations you're
going to want to get recognition from are primarily English-speaking
organisations. You might be able to get FSF-Europe to give the OK for the
FSF, if they've got good French-speaking licence analysers, and if OSI's
licence vetting process is what I've heard it is (trusting the drafting
lawyer's assertion that it's OK) you might be OK there, but I doubt
debian-legal is going to be able to discuss a licence without an
authoritative English version to work from.
The other problem with only having a French licence is that anyone who can't
fluently read French is going to have no idea what the terms are under which
they can modify the software. That's going to mean that you'll either have
a lot of potential contributors down the tubes, or a lot of people
infringing your licence without knowing it. Relying on an unofficial
translation of the licence isn't going to help much, either.
Note that these problems do also exist for English language licences and
non-English speakers, but in practical terms they are diminished because
(for better or worse) most people have at least a basic knowledge of
English.
- Matt
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