Einar,
* "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project * for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit (http://www.openssl.org/)".
All developers would have to do is include the acknowledgment stated above.
I think this is not bad for specific applications, but forcing this upon all code compiled by GHC would be bad. I think the compiler should not link applications by default to things that force license related things.
I think this is one reason GMP is being replaced.
ps. personally I don't think the advertising clause is bad, but I think it is bad to force it on other users.
You may be right. The licensing problem with GHC, as I understood it, is summed up at <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ ReplacingGMPNotes>. LGPL is very restrictive. As I have been working on separating BN out of the main OpenSSL distribution, renaming symbols and generally reforming it into a custom, stand-alone library for GHC I could take it one step further and implement it from scratch as a GHC library. Implementing the BN library from scratch may take some time but I will give it a shot and see if I can't get better benchmarks. The downside is that I would have more incentive to remove some Cryptography-based cruft, such as BN_nnmod, BN_mod_add, BN_mod_sub and the BN-random routines, as these are unnecessary for Prelude and GHC. Best regards, Peter