[MLton] MLton library project

[Florian Weimer]

* Stephen Weeks:

>> It's also not clear if you need to keep copyright notices in
>> compiled binaries.
>
> I'm afraid I didn't write the license and can't change it, at least
> not without the original copyright holder's (NEC's) permission, which
> is not really obtainable at this point.  So, that ambiguity will
> remain.

It's probably not a real issue because this type of license is rather
widespread, and it doesn't come up often.

If the license ins unchangeable, you really shouldn't change it.  If
there are different conditions or different copyright holders, you
should use a separate copyright statement, even if the bulk of it is
the same.  See Python and OpenSSL for some rather extreme examples.

>  1. Require that all contributors who want to assert copyright modify
>     MLton-LICENSE, extending the copyright notice.  Go back to the old
>     http://mlton.org/License, and add a note explaining that there is
>     no intention to assigning copyright and that contributors can add
>     to the notice. 

I think this would be fine.  To some extent, it would be the
contributor's fault if they do not show up in the license file, so
they can't really blame a distributor for not sifting through all
source files.

Hopefully, one day, there will be a source code documentation tool
that helps to collect this information mechanically.  (GCC can do this
to some extent, by the way.)