Re: SV: [Haskell-cafe] RFC: "Native -XCPP" Proposal

LGPL is well-known and non-acceptable here. Show me some serious case law for Malcolm's customized LGPL and we can start talking. Other than that, explanations are not going to be helpful. Thanks, Yitz On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 4:51 AM, Howard B. Golden wrote:

Hi Yitzchak,

I believe there are good explanations of open source licenses aimed at lawyers and management. I don't think their fears are well-founded. If you work for a timid company that isn't willing to learn, you should consider going elsewhere. You may be happier in the long run.

Respectfully,

Howard

...

On May 20, 2015, at 7:39 AM, Yitzchak Gale wrote:

The license issue is a real concern for any company using GHC to develop a product whose binaries they distribute to customers. And it is concern for GHC itself, if we want GHC to continue to be viewed as a candidate for use in industry.

The real issue is not whether you can explain why this license is OK, or whether anyone is actually going to the trouble of building GHC without GMP.

The issue is the risk of a *potential* legal issue and its potential disastrous cost as *perceived* by lawyers and management. A potential future engineering cost, no matter how large and even if only marginally practical, is perceived as manageable and controllable, whereas a poorly understood potential future legal threat is perceived as an existential risk to the entire company.

With GMP, we do have an engineering workaround to side-step the legal problem entirely if needed. Whereas if cpphs were to be linked into GHC with its current license, I would be ethically obligated to report it to my superiors, and the response might very well be: Then never mind, let's do the simple and safe thing and just rewrite all of our applications in Java or C#.

Keeping the license as is seems to be important to Malcolm. So could we have an option to build GHC without cpphs and instead use it as a stand-alone external program? That would make the situation no worse than GMP.

Thanks, Yitz _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs