[ocaml-infra] ocaml.org licensing

[Fabrice Le Fessant]

On Sat, Mar 1, 2014 at 9:06 PM, Christophe Troestler
<Christophe.Troestler at umons.ac.be> wrote:
> I am not sure.  I think this file will likely be overlooked (plus,
> does it apply recursively or do you copy it in every sub-directory of,
> say, site/ ?  I am also unclear about what is "unixish" in having a
> license file in each subdir.

What I meant was: we should try to avoid mixing in the same directory
files with different licenses. Otherwise, there can be only one
license file, listing all the licenses and which directories they
target.

The Unix way meant "not on the web" :-)

> One can always dream of several 10,000 visitors a day but multiplying
> the number of sites will not make it happen.  Python, for all its
> followers, does not have several sites that all pretend to be the main
> reference.  All other sites talking about python will happily
> reference http://python.org/ as the place were python lives.  We have
> about 1000 visitors a day ATM and the task force in the community is
> not that large.  I think it is more efficient to have all willing
> people improve a single (multilingual) web site (which has been
> thought from the start to run well on mobiles BTW).

For Python, following your example, there is a http://www.afpy.org/
for the french community, with its own forums and mailing-lists. I
imagine that there are similar websites for most non-english
countries. For Linux, there are hundred of websites, but only one
community, isn't it ?

I think that saying "it's the only website for the community" is very
dangerous. Other people might want to create websites with different
goals, designs, etc. They might want to have the control over the
content, the moderation, etc. Why would the community belongs to this
website ? There is a very big difference between saying that you are
trying to build a "website for the community" (which is very good
thing to do) and "THE community website", which is what I hear here
all the time (see Amir's comment about his fear of seeing forks of
this website).

Also, you cannot say: everybody who wants to build a website for OCaml
should join this team. It is an utopia. Life is not like that. People
don't gather together even if they have the same goal, there are
hundreds of reasons why people might want _not_ to join this team, and
create their own website instead. Why are there many companies
producing the same thing in the world, and not only one ? Why are
there so many software doing exactly the same thing, instead of just
one ?

> Doesn't CC BY-SA 4.0 do just that (see the "ShareAlike" clause)?
> https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Indeed ! I didn't check that part of the license, I thought it had
another meaning. That's very good !

--Fabrice