Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hmm, what license to use?

magnus:

2008/9/29 Bit Connor : [..]

Basically it seems to me that you believe in the benevolence and enligtenment of companies. Something I don't. I believe you are right in splitting the LGPL into two different objectives, and you are right in saying that I really only care about getting changes back.

...

So in summary, if user freedom is important, then GPL is the way to go. If it's about encouraging the submission of patches and contributions, then the license won't help you, you simply have to rely on the good will of people. (But BSD will allow for a larger community)

Well, I'm not convinced about this. I fail to see how your use of Apple is an example of this. Yes, they clearly didn't get it in the beginning, but now there seems to be a vibrant community around Webkit. Just as a point of comparison, did they do any better (in the beginning) with the BSD licensed code they use? I sure haven't heard anything along those lines anyways.

The big problem with the LGPL and Haskell is static linking. We can't use anything we wish to ship commercially that relies on LGPLd-statically linked-and-inlined Haskell code at the moment. So if you use LGPL for your Haskell libraries, all of which are currently statically linked and non-replaceable at runtime, it is unlikely any commercial Haskell house can use the code. Note that this *isn't* the case for C libraries, which are dynamically linked, like libgmp, which is just fine. This is why the OCaml guys use their untested LGPL+static linking exception, I guess. -- Don