On 7/30/06, Brian Hulley
p.tanski@gmail.com wrote:
GHC Task Ticket # 601 suggests replacing GMP with OpenSSL's Bignum library, BN. I have two questions concerning this:
From the ticket, this looks very scary:
but its LGPL license is problematic for users of GHC (it prohibits static linking of GHC-compiled programs, for example).
Does this mean I can't distribute my Haskell app as a commercial application? I certainly don't want to distribute source code and I've got
I am not a lawyer, and you should consult lawyer if you want real advice about licensing issues. Strict answer to first question: No. You can distribute statically compiled binaries.
no idea how to compile a Haskell app other than using ghc --make, which creates a single exe ie with static linkage.
But in this case, yes, you can't. You need to provide way to relink gmp in you program. As far as I know, this is simply possible by taking all the objs --make generates, other objs and libs and giving them on - users need to have ghc distro+their own gmp set in.
If I only use Int's (not Integer's) in my code, is there a way to get rid of GMP so that I won't have an impossible licencing problem when trying to
I am fairly certain you cannot force or rely GMP getting dropped by linker.
distribute my application binary? If not, then it would seem absolutely vital to get rid of GMP as soon as possible or else try to persuade the authors to add the usual static linking exception to their LGPL licence for it.
GMP being rather GNU ;-) replacing is probably the only option. There's other reason for dropping GMP as well: The ghc rts steals GMP memory allocation (sort of integrating it with garbage collector) which makes it impossible for other parts of program use GMP (in practice). HTH, --Esa