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

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Josh Triplett <josh.trip@verizon.net> wrote:
> Walter Landry wrote:
> > I haven't seen anyone seriously dispute my analysis in
> > 
> >   http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01705.html
> > 
> > that there is a fee involved (you questioned whether it was an
> > acceptable fee, not whether it was a fee at all).  Matthew Palmer
> > mentioned it again here
> > 
> >   http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/07/msg01739.html
> > 
> > and there was no response.  I also mentioned it here
> > 
> >   http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/08/msg00131.html
> > 
> > Unless someone comes up with something now, the argument looks pretty
> > clear.
> 
> I strongly disagree that such clauses are non-free.
> 
> 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.

I would say that any license that compels modifications to be under
anything other than a copyleft is problematic.  Copyleft is only
allowed because it is explicitly grandfathered in by DFSG #10.

So the GPL, MIT/BSD/X11, IBM CPL, and Artistic licenses don't have
this problem.  This hypothetical license does.  I don't think any
licenses in Debian have this problem, although I could be wrong.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu