Re: [Haskell-cafe] LGPL and Haskell (Was: Re: ANNOUNCE: tie-knot library)

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Colin Adams wrote:

On 13 December 2012 08:09, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

To take this out of the academic realm and into the real-life realm: I've actually done projects for companies which have corporate policies disallowing the usage of any copyleft licenses in their toolset. My use case was a web application, which would not have been affected by a GPL library usage since we were not distributing binaries. Nonetheless, those clients would not have allowed usage of any such libraries. You can argue whether or not this is a good decision on their part, but I don't think the companies I interacted with were unique in this regard.

So anyone who's considering selling Haskell-based services to companies could very well be in a situation where any (L)GPL libraries are non-starters, regardless of actual legal concerns.

Presumably you are talking about companies who want to distribute programs (a very small minority of companies, I would think)?

No, read my use case again. I was creating a web application for a company. The company was not going to distribute my code in any way to their clients. Nonetheless, the company had a corporate policy to not use *any* copyleft licenses, and therefore I was unable to use a library such as Pandoc. (I believe this policy affected me at two separate companies, but I don't remember all the details tbh.) I also don't think that distributing programs is as small a market as you think, and should also be something we support for commercial users of Haskell. Michael