# Foreword

- Conventions
- License
- Availability

This manual documents the release 5.5 of the OCaml system. It is organized as follows.

- Part I, “An introduction to OCaml”, gives an overview of the language.
- Part II, “The OCaml language”, is the reference description of the language.
- Part III, “The OCaml tools”, documents the compilers, toplevel system, and programming utilities.
- Part IV, “The OCaml library”, describes the modules provided in the standard library.

## ﻿Conventions

OCaml runs on several operating systems. The parts of this manual that are specific to one operating system are presented as shown below:

> Unix:This is material specific to the Unix family of operating systems, including Linux and macOS.

> Windows:This is material specific to Microsoft Windows (Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11).

## ﻿License

The OCaml system is copyright © 1996–2026 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). INRIA holds all ownership rights to the OCaml system.

The OCaml system is open source and can be freely redistributed. See the file LICENSE in the distribution for licensing information.

The OCaml documentation and user’s manual is copyright © 2026 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA).

The OCaml documentation and user's manual is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The sample code in the user's manual and in the reference documentation of the standard library is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication License.

## ﻿Availability

The complete OCaml distribution can be accessed via the ocaml.org website. This site contains a lot of additional information on OCaml.