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:

> Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
>>> 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.
>
> Sigh. Yes. Postulate a similar license whose hoops we can't jump
> through. Should it be free? If not, why not?

I can't imagine such a thing that isn't very clearly free or very
clearly non-free for lots of other reasons.  Can you come up with an
example?  Many of the imagined licenses on this list seem to be
tricornered squares -- perhaps a sign that our terminology isn't good
enough (i.e., orthogonal) yet.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu