[Demexp-dev] CDuce and its QPL v1.0 license

[David MENTRE]

Hello Mr. Frish,

My name is David Mentré and I'm the lead developer of the demexp
software (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/demexp) programmed in
OCaml. In this project, we will, amongst other things, read/write XML
files and more generally manipulate our databases in XML format.

On our development mailing list, somebody has suggested that we could
use CDuce for that job and, judging from the cduce.org web site, it might
be suited to our tasks.

However, before even looking at CDuce technically, I have noticed that
CDuce is under QPL v1.0 License
(http://www.cduce.org/c-bin/viewcvs.cgi/LICENSE?rev=1.2&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup).
This license is considered as non-free software by the Debian project
(http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DFSGLicences). This is an issue for us
as demexp is free software (under GNU GPL license) and we do not want to
rely on non-free software to build it.

Therefore, I would like to know if, as a project leader of CDuce, you
would consider possible to obtain CDuce under a free software license
((L)GPL, BSD-like license, Apache license) under a short or mid term
time frame?

If this is not possible, we will have to drop CDuce in favor of another
package. 

I'm sorry to bring out this kind of legal issues. I'm personally not
fond of them. But we need to consider them to guarantee the viability of
our project. Moreover you should notice that they will reappear if you
try to make CDuce available in major free software distributions like
Debian, Mandrake, etc.


Sincerely yours,
d. mentré
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pub  1024D/A3AD7A2A 2004-10-03 David MENTRE <address@hidden>
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