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

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Brian Thomas Sniffen writes:

> Which, incidentally, is an issue.  If some user sends you a patch for
> O'Caml, you can't apply it, because then you'll be distributing
> software under the QPL, and trigger QPL 3b, which means you have to
> grant the initial author permission to relicense... but you aren't the
> copyright holder for the patch, and so can't grant that permission.
> 
> This ends up being not merely theoretically non-free, but a serious
> practical problem for Debian.

This does not follow.  The patch's original author "releases" the
change by sending it to Sven (or whoever maintains the package in
question), triggering 3b.

You can argue that this forces a particular license on changes, but
you can't contribute a change to GPL software under a 4-clause BSD
license, so it is not particularly new.

Michael Poole