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



* Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net> [040812 19:38]:
[am permutating the sections here]
> Finally, it seems like this is covered by the DFSG FAQ
> (http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html) point 12e, which says that
> it is fine for some people to have more rights than others, as long as
> everyone has a Free license.

The point here is: has anyone a free licence? This does not even touch
the question if requiring people to give the original author more
permissions is free, because there is only this licence available for
them.

> Consider for a moment a license that said something like "You must
> either distribute under this license with source, or under a proprietary
> license without source.", (where the license is otherwise
> BSD/MIT/X11-like, and with a definition for "proprietary" given
> somewhere in the license).  This would be a form of "copyleft", that
> requires derived works to maintain the "right" for _everyone_ to make
> proprietary derived works.  I think such a license would still be Free,
> albeit annoying.  For someone who only cares about Free Software, the
> additional permission is useless, and only serves to allow others to
> take the work proprietary.

What does proprietary mean here? is public domain proprietary in this
sense, too? what does "without source" mean? One does not need or is not
allowed to give the source?

I think this comes to the question, whether having to allow non-free
things is some kind of fee. I'd rather feel that requiring permissions
is at least very near to unfreeness...

> Now consider a similar license with one change: only the original
> developer may release under a proprietary license.  Such a change
> reduces the number of people who can take the software proprietary.  It
> seems like if the case above is a Free license, then this one would be
> as well, and would actually be preferable.

There still is the problem if this asymmetry is allowed for
DFSG 3. (i.e. is writing out a name or refering to "original" author,
thus changing the effects for different people though different people
have the same "licence text" to obey.)

Hochachtungsvoll,
  Bernhard R. Link

-- 
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing
an editor and a MTA.



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