Re: possible readline license problem with ghc and -package util

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 13. June 2002 03:12, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote,

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On Wednesday 12. June 2002 10:12, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:

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Knowing the GHC developers for quite a while (and having had BSD versus GPL discussions with them before), my answer would be that they are perfectly trustworthy, but suffer from the common "BSD is more free than GPL" misconception[1]. Otherwise, they are perfectly nice guys (even if they have a @microsoft.com address ;-)

I see the people being very nice. But there is the question whether MS would draw them away from GHC if it desides to go full-scale with something based on GHC. That would surely hit GHC hard. If they could just say, no, we're here to stay, MS is paying us, but they just want to use the compiler we make, not own it, I'd be perfectly fine.

That's an assurance beyond any license that you will rarely get. Even on a GPL'ed project, the company could always drop the funding unless the company's core business depends on that software.

Dang, thought I was done... ;) But this answer seems important. I wasn't talking about simply dropping the funding. I meant pulling the developers from the open project into a closed one with the same goal, which of course will be based on the open project. This could quite likely mean a fatal blow to free GHC, in favour of a big "professional" product. That's a real danger, I'm just trying to point that out. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to attack anyone, nor am I expecting any action, like relicensing GHC or anything. I've already got an answer from Simon, which I beleive weighs enough. _But_ his answer "I'm not aware of any plans, at Microsoft or otherwise, to create a non-free fork of GHC" does not at all mean that the danger I'm pointing at is no longer there. I'm absolutely not blaming Simon for it though. It's really hard for me to try not to insult anyone. I'll shut up now, I've made my point. Sven Moritz -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE9CFSbBz8tX8KX/qsRAplXAJwMdzip2/zV/KtUMLneAbsLZH2qDACfY3cC 2hUlPARH1hI6XRwTDK1JhcM= =puBU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----