[Aldor-l] Aldor is or is not free?

[Timo Jyrinki]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Jacques Carette wrote:

> Note that Ocaml is distributed with some of those Linux distributions, and it 
> comes under a license with some restrictions (mainly a variant of the Q 
> license).  So this issue is not so clear.
>
> http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/license.en.html

Yep, Q license is a bit cumbersome, but even though it's not recommended 
to be used outside the current projects, it's a free software license and 
also an OSI-approved license. It's still very much a different thing than 
eg. APL2 which is clearly against free software and open source 
definitions.

I should correct myself in that distributions could be packaging also 
Aldor possibly in the future, since distributions have a place for 
freely distributable but otherwise non-free software too. However, it's a 
bit of a "second-class citizen" situation since it will be never endorsed 
by the distributions.

> You may also wish to (re)read
> http://www.aldor.org/pipermail/aldor-l/2007-September/000715.html

Thanks for this pointer, I didn't notice it when I was quickly browsing 
the archives. It explains the reasons typically given when too afraid of 
making a software open, but does not really change the fact that Aldor is 
in no way open source or free software at the moment, so documentation 
etc. should be updated to reflect it.

Without going too deep about free software business possibilities, the 
thing that is usually wanted by "non-commercial" clause is that no-one 
makes huge amounts of money on "our" work. The truth is that copyleft 
free software license is in this situation usually achieving the same 
result, as no _one_ company can achieve huge amounts of money since the 
competition field is level and anyone can try to make the money. 
Furthermore, it is the original developer of the free software anyway who 
is usually most trusted if searching for a company to pay for eg. Aldor 
development.

I don't claim it's a wrong decision to keep Aldor non-free, I just find it 
unfortunate as it won't play a role it could be playing in the free 
software world, and also hurts Axiom at the same time.

Best Regards,
Timo Jyrinki