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by doozy 3225 days ago
Unfortunately OCaml itself has its own weird licensing issues being distributed under a combination of the QPL and GNU licenses.

Every few years I take a look at it, notice the license and move on. There's no reason whatsoever for a language not to have an implementation under a permissive license.
2 comments
Drup 3225 days ago
The QPL is not used anymore. The OCaml compiler is GPL, the OCaml standard library is LGPL with the OCaml linking exception and the license of produced binaries is whatever the author wants.

If you still have issues with that .. I would really like an explanation.

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xfer 3225 days ago
People just want reasons to complain about languages, see also: racket, when they have nothing to complain about they pick the license.
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moron4hire 3225 days ago
No, there's no reason to avoid the GPL for languages, because you aren't building a derivative work of the language itself, so it's licensing has no bearing on your software.
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steinuil 3225 days ago
That's not entirely true; GCC (and almost every other GPL-licensed compiler) has a specific exception for its runtime libraries that lets you distribute their compiled version under any license [1].

But for example, Ada Core's GNAT is licensed under GPL but doesn't have that exception, which makes the binaries it outputs be licensed under the GPL as well, to make you buy the Pro version of the compiler.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gcc-exception-faq.html

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