Jon Harrop wrote:

> I believe we are all free to fork OCaml, create a new open source project and 
> begin our own iterative improvements to it.

Forking the library is ok, because it is licensed LGPL with the
linking exception. No problem there.

The Ocaml compiler is quite another matter. From this page:

    http://caml.inria.fr/pub/old_caml_site/ocaml/LICENSE.html

    "The compilers and tools (all other directories in the source
    distribution) are distributed under the terms of the Q Public
    License version 1.0."

which then links to this page:

    http://trolltech.com/products/qt/licenses/licensing/qpl

which contains a section 3 as follows:

    3. You may make modifications to the Software and distribute your
    modifications, in a form that is separate from the Software, such
    as patches. The following restrictions apply to modifications: 

    a. Modifications must not alter or remove any copyright notices in
    the Software.

    b. When modifications to the Software are released under this 
    license, a non-exclusive royalty-free right is granted to the 
    initial developer of the Software to distribute your modification
    in future versions of the Software provided such versions remain 
    available under these terms in addition to any other license(s) 
    of the initial developer.

Distributing modifications to the compiler in the form of patches is
a bit of a PITA.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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"Mutable state is actually another form of manual memory management: every
time you over-write a value you are making a decision that the old value is
now garbage, regardless of what other part of the program might have been
using it." -- Paul Johnson