[MLton-user] Is mlton free software?

[Bartlomiej Szymczak]

On 5/15/07, Jesper Louis Andersen <jesper.louis.andersen at gmail.com> wrote:
> The license used by MLton has a clause stating that the
> license itself must be included in derived works. In other words,
> you have to give credit to the original project. You are free to fork
> the project and create your own, closed, version as long as you
> retain the copyright notice and license file.
>
> Does this thing happen in the real world? Yes. Juniper networks sells
> routers based on an old fork of FreeBSD. Ciscos IOS include(d/s) a malloc()
> implementation from FreeBSD. Several vendors has taken the OpenSSH
> code and used it. Is this bad? It depends on your personal views.
>

val MLtonLicense = ...

val scenario1 =
"Some company decides that they will just take MLton source, integrate
it with their existing GUI editor (by adding just syntax highlighting)
and start selling this marketed as a super-duper SML IDE in
closed-source version."

fun isLegal scenario license = ...

val legality1 = isLegal scenario1 MLtonLicense

In GNU/Linux distribution I use (Gentoo), the only available MLton
version is 20040227. So I've been reading the sources for a while and
I thought MLton is GPL-ed. Then I've read the Wiki and I've
encountered the license page and after this nice discussion with all
of you I know that legality1=true.

I know that you've changed the license to attract some potential
users. I also know that this way you repel new developers. Well, at
least one - me. I'm sorry to say, but I can't accept legality1 and I
need to search for other SML project to involve myself in. But hey,
it's OK, I've learned a lesson - this time the first thing I'll check
is the current license.

Best regards,
-- 
Bartlomiej Szymczak