On Wednesday 25 February 2009 07:47:16 am Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 25. Februar 2009 14:33 schrieb Duncan Coutts:
Note that some people will tell you that by a strict interpretation of the LGPL that statically linked Haskell libs under that license are a pain in the backside. When we decided on that license for gtk2hs that was not our intention. In other words nobody is going to sue you if you statically link gtk2hs libs. Of course if you need a cast iron legal guarantee then that's not good enough and you'd have to ship .a and .o files to let users relink if they wanted to.
I’m not sure whether this would be enough. .a and .o files are not compatible among GHC versions, as far as I know. Relinking against newer Gtk2Hs versions might not work. And a program using Gtk2Hs contains code from the .hi files of Gtk2Hs through inlining. So it’s not pure linking. However, the LGPL only allows linking, as far as I understand.
I want to repeat what I’ve said earlier on this list: For Haskell, there is no real difference between LGPL and GPL, as far as I understand it. If you don’t want to force the users of your library to use an open source license for their work then use BSD3 or a similar license for your library.
Best wishes, Wolfgang
Alternatively Haskell could add shared library support, like every other
language.
Regards,
--
Conrad Meyer