[opam-devel] Opam license bug

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le mardi, 19 janvier 2016 à 15:17, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> 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).

This is not true. As Louis acknowledged the only thing you need is agreement by all the contributors to correct the license. There is absolutely no need to introduce a CLA to correct the opam license bug. I find it very distasteful from the part of OCamlPro to try to make people believe that this is the case.
  
> Note that OCamlPro's CLA is just a copy of the standard one used by Google and many companies and organizations, that do not transfer copyright, but just allows OCamlPro to change the license. I haven't checked, but it is even maybe the same as Inria's one for OCaml.


The fact that it's used by other companies is irrelevant. The way I read your CLA is that it effectively gives complete control (including the right to relicense) to OCamlPro over opam and the contributions that are made to it while it doesn't give that right to the contributors (if opam remains under the LGPL).  

Best,

Daniel