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RE: Packaging O'Caml


On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) wrote:

> Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> > However, parts of it are released under the "Q
> > Public license", which GNU lists explicitly as
> > non-GPL-compatible.  Does this mean an automatic
> > "no" to an official Cygwin package [...] ?
>
> From http://cygwin.com/licensing.html:
> In accordance with section 10 of the GPL, Red Hat permits programs whose
> sources are distributed under a license that complies with the Open
> Source definition to be linked with libcygwin.a without libcygwin.a
> itself causing the resulting program to be covered by the GNU GPL.

Interestingly enough, this doesn't mention cygwin1.dll, only libcygwin.a,
but I may be nitpicking...

> IANAL, but the Q Public License is listed on the OSI web page, so there
> don't appear to be any legal restrictions -- some Cygwin packages use
> different open source licenses already.
>
> Or have there been policy changes for new Cygwin packages that I'm not
> aware of?

What threw me off was this sentense on the GNU GPL licensing page
(<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html>):

	Since the QPL is incompatible with the GNU GPL, you cannot take a
	GPL-covered program and QPL-covered program and link them
	together, no matter how.

However, it seems I didn't read the document carefully enough, as it goes
on to say

	However, if you have written a program that uses QPL-covered
	library (called FOO), and you want to release your program under
	the GNU GPL, you can easily do that. You can resolve the conflict
	for your program by adding a notice like this to it:

	  As a special exception, you have permission to link this program
	  with the FOO library and distribute executables, as long as you
	  follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in regard to all of the
	  software in the executable aside from FOO.

which is almost exactly what you quoted from the Cygwin licensing page.
So I guess we're ok.  As soon as I work out the packaging bugs, I'll ITP
O'Caml.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing
whatever you think is worth doing."  -- Dr. Jubal Harshaw


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