ocaml
HACKING.adoc: comment on the OCaml license
This is a proposal for some informal explanation of the licensing terms of the OCaml compiler distribution, prompted by the discussion with @jonahbeckford in #13177
Question. It's no longer possible to get the compiler under a less restrictive license by becoming part of the consortium ?
I'm not sure; my understanding is that:
- Most industrial members of the Consortium, who were mostly interested in providing some financial support for the OCaml ecosystem, migrated to become sponsors of the OCaml Software Foundation instead in 2018-2019.
- The Foundation does not own any compiler-related IP and does not offer anything licensing-related. As a consequence, some industrial users that do want a BSD-licensed compiler remained in the consortium (which is otherwise an empty shell nowadays, I think? I'm not involved.).
- To my knowledge, there have been no new members of the consortium since.
In any case I was not particularly planning to mention/describe these external structures in that paragraph. (We do describe the CLA in Contributing.adoc, and I think that is important.)
The Caml Consortium special licensing scheme is still there, and is the main reason why the Consortium still exists. However, we'd prefer industrial users of OCaml to join the Foundation rather than to join the Consortium, and to live with the LGPL-with-exception license rather than to use their own licenses.
I rebased the PR to take the comments into account (thanks!). The paragraph reassuring downstream forks regarding the linking exception now reads as follows:
Finally: If you have your own fork of the OCaml compiler and standard library, it must be distributed to your own users under the same license (LGPL + exception), and your users will also benefit from the linking exception.
I rebased the PR to take the comments into account (thanks!). The paragraph reassuring downstream forks regarding the linking exception now reads as follows:
Finally: If you have your own fork of the OCaml compiler and standard library, it must be distributed to your own users under the same license (LGPL + exception), and your users will also benefit from the linking exception.
LGTM! Thanks.
I'm also fine with using the phrase "compiler, standard library and runtime" consistently and repeatedly as @hannesm mentioned, although introducing new terms ("distribution") seems unnecessary and confusing IMHO.
I took @hannesm's comments into account (thanks!) and rebased the PR. I am thinking of merging when the CI agrees.