The licensing situation for Poly/ML is complicated because of its history. I originally wrote Poly/ML nearly twenty years ago when I was a post-doc at Cambridge. In those days there wasn't the same attitude to making software freely available especially as distribution was a matter of half-inch tapes in Jiffy bags. As an employee of the university the rights were split between myself as author, the university and the SRC who had provided the grant. I transferred my rights to the university's company, originally called Lynxvale later renamed CUTS, who after some false starts agreed a licensing deal with Abstract Hardware (AHL). AHL then wrote the X-Windows code, translated the original Poly code into Standard ML and did much of the work on the i386 port. When AHL went bust that left the rights split between CUTS and AHL's liquidators. I eventually managed to persuade the liquidators to transfer AHL's intellectual property to CUTS on condition that the customers of AHL's other intellectual property could use Poly/ML. So, I personally own very little of the intellectual property rights in Poly/ML, really only work done since it went open source, for instance the Basis library code.
The present licence was based on the BSD licence. It was drafted by a lawyer at Edinburgh and after a long delay it was finally signed by CUTS. A number of people looked at it particularly at LFCS in Edinburgh and made suggestions. The clause that seems to be causing problems was inserted largely to prevent the situation where a company developed, say, a new code-generator, and didn't make it available to everyone. On the other hand, GPL is too strong because it would appear to make it impossible for a company to develop software and distribute it with Poly/ML in such a way that they could retain their code as closed source. It's possible that the "Lesser GPL" that is used for libraries might be acceptable.
Any change to the licence would have to be agreed by CUTS and given the time I spent trying to get them to sign the current licence I feel there would have to be a convincing case to make changes. If people really are being discouraged from contributing to Poly/ML or using it then I might be able to make a case.
On Tuesday, Mar 16, 2004, at 16:19 Europe/London, Martin Ellis wrote:
Apart from this, perhaps? "If you are downloading this in order to make it available to others, for example to install it on a server at your University or place of work, you agree that everyone who has use of Poly/ML will abide by this licence." [1]
That surely can't be feasible.
Most universities require their students and staff to agree to abide by software licensing rules. That would be quite sufficient.
I'm happy to work with anyone who wants to do development work.
Yet, when asked about the issues relating to the license you don't answer? [2]
That particular message was posted to the Debian legal mailing list. Previous messages in the thread had been copied to me and I replied and copied my reply to the list. I don't read the list so naturally I didn't see that message.
David.