[Fedora-packaging] OCaml "LGPLv2 with exceptions" - what should be in the License field?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Fri Feb 15 14:55:36 UTC 2008


Jason Tibbitts who has been kindly reviewing many of my packages raises
a question about the License field for a common license for OCaml.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=432482

The license starts with this preamble, and then continues with the
ordinary LGPLv2.  Note that this license is more permissive than the
standard LGPL, so this is not a question about whether this is free
software or not.

<quote>
    This Library is distributed under the terms of the GNU Library General
    Public License version 2 (included below).

    As a special exception to the GNU Library General Public License, you
    may link, statically or dynamically, a "work that uses the Library"
    with a publicly distributed version of the Library to produce an
    executable file containing portions of the Library, and distribute
    that executable file under terms of your choice, without any of the
    additional requirements listed in clause 6 of the GNU Library General
    Public License.  By "a publicly distributed version of the Library",
    we mean either the unmodified Library as distributed by INRIA, or a
    modified version of the Library that is distributed under the
    conditions defined in clause 3 of the GNU Library General Public
    License.  This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons
    why the executable file might be covered by the GNU Library General
    Public License.
</quote>

Many OCaml libraries use a license like this because the relinking
requirements described in LGPL make no sense for OCaml libraries.

Rich.

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