[opam-devel] Opam license bug

[Anil Madhavapeddy]

On 19 Jan 2016, at 14:17, Fabrice Le Fessant <Fabrice.Le_fessant at inria.fr> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:47 AM Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli at erratique.ch <mailto:daniel.buenzli at erratique.ch>> wrote:
> 3. I'm perfectly fine if opam stays with the LGPL. I'm not however fine with the added CLA.
> 
> I must repeat at this point that, as written in the first mail, the reason why Louis was proposing to use a CLA for OPAM is that the current license is not LGPL. It is a wrongly patched LGPL v3, with an exception coming from LGPL v2, that makes it unusable in the context of OCaml. Without a CLA from major contributors to OPAM, the only option is to move to GPL (LGPL has a clause that allows switching to GPL without agreement from the contributors).

Dear all,

The ability to be flexible about the license is important to the project, and a large-scale relicensing to a BSD license is not practical at this stage in the project (nor is it fair to hijack Louis' initial request).

I wanted to raise two points however:

- 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 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.

best,
Anil
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