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

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:
>
>> I think b) is only non-free if I'm required to grant freedoms to one or
>> the other group that I wasn't granted myself, such that I'm required to
>> redistribute derived works under different terms than those I received
>> myself; DSFG#3.
>
> I'm still not sure that this is what DFSG 3 was /intended/ to say, even
> though it looks like that's what it does say. At a guess, I'd say that
> it was there to prevent a situation where DFSG 3 effectively had to
> contain the entirity of the rest of the DFSG again. The current phrasing
> means that you never end up in a situation where the recipient is unable
> to provide the set of freedoms that'd we'd describe as necessary.
>
> On the other hand, the current phrasing has weird corner cases. A
> hyopthetical license that said "This code is under a BSD-style license.
> If you downloaded it via FTP, remove this license and attach the GNU GPL
> version 2 or higher" probably /ought/ to be free, since there's never a
> situation where it's not at least the GPL. But DFSG 3 appears to prevent
> it. I don't think that's what it was intended to do, but the only person
> who knows is Bruce.

But with that license, we can just jump through the hoops and
distribute it under the GPL, which is free.  We can't take advantage
of wacky privileges the author gives, but that's OK.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu