[opam-devel] Opam license bug

Fabrice Le Fessant Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr
Tue Jan 19 15:15:58 GMT 2016


>
> - I would very much like to align OPAM and OCaml's licensing, and one is
> LGPLv3 and the other is LGPLv2.  The latter is commercially more widely
> acceptable, and more importantly is set in stone after the recent
> consortium meeting.  What would the maintainer's feelings of aligning the
> OPAM license exactly with that of OCaml, so that we at least have a
> standard copyleft license for the ecosystem.
>

I don't see any problem with that. The idea behing choosing LGPLv3 in the
first place was that it was supposed to be a more modern license than
LGPLv2, but having both OPAM and OCaml share the same license is probably
simpler for people to understand the ecosystem.


> - I sense that some of the issues with the CLA are that external
> contributors are uncomfortable with a commercial company with no published
> future plans for OPAM.
>
Perhaps it would make things easier if a body such as the Caml Consortium
> held the OPAM CLA.  It's not clear to me if the Consortium wants this, but
> I thought I'd raise the topic.  It would be hugely beneficial to commercial
> users to have one place to get the OCaml ecosystem under a BSD-style
> license for embedding in products.
>

Even if most of the development of OPAM has been funded by Jane Street,
OCamlPro has also contributed to OPAM on its own funding. Moving the CLA
(if adopted) into the Caml Consortium would just remove any hope for
OCamlPro to get back this investment, as reselling BSD-style license might
be the only possible business activity around OPAM.

Moreover, I don't see why it would be simpler to contact INRIA to get a
license for the OCaml compiler if what you want is to get a license on
OPAM, and you could just contact OCamlPro for that.

--Fabrice
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