[opam-devel] Opam license bug

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Oh well, another license/cla/ianal/lawyers-are-evil thread / troll...

Being, still today, the 5th opam contributor, according to the git commit
debatable metrics I am of course obliged to feed the troll.

So, well, first of all, let me totally and deeply disagree on the cursorily
repeated assertions in this thread that imply that GPL is BAD and BSD is
GOOD. This kind of generic self asserting statements are ok among kids, not
grown up persons able to master a sophisticated language like OCaml.

Personally, I am strongly against moving from LGPL to BSD, and no matter if
you agree or not with me, that clearly means that such a move would not
encourage contributions in general, but only contributions from BSD fans.

Roberto Di Cosmo (via mobile/cell)
Le 18 janv. 2016 21:57, "Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli at erratique.ch> a
écrit :

> Le lundi, 18 janvier 2016 à 20:50, Yaron Minsky a écrit :
> > Daniel, would you be opposed to a CLA if the code were released under a
> more liberal license? For our open source code, Jane Street was advised to
> use a CLA, even though we were using a liberal license (Apache, in
> particular.) I'm curious if the CLA itself is a problem, or just the CLA in
> combination with a restrictive license?
>
> It depends on the terms of the CLA and if I'm actually able to get a
> reasonable grasp of it and its implications by myself.
>
> For example if the CLA only asks me to grant the rights under the license
> of the project itself and to guarantee that I'm the actual author of the
> code I guess I could actually sign that. Though it feels more like
> bureaucracy and barriers that needed, this should somehow be implied by the
> act of committing to the repo under your name (but IANAL).
>
> However I would still not want the proposed CLA mentioned in this thread
> with a liberal license — just start talking about licensing patent grants
> for your company (pt 3.) in your terms and the lawyers of possibly
> contributing companies will start to trip out. As Thomas mention we should
> rather look to make it easier to accept contributions in opam than increase
> the legal work needed to do so.
>
> On a more personal level I'm interested in keeping the lawyers as much as
> possible out of the loop* and I'm only willing to work with projects that
> have the same attitude, I do not see CLAs in general as being part of this
> attitude.
>
> Best,
>
> Daniel
>
> * w.r.t. I'm actually planning to gradually relicense all my software
> under a simpler license than the BSD3 I have been using for now.
>
>
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