Thanks John, The simple answer is that I need to be able to use HDBC in proprietary products and the LGPL makes this awkward - the most serious issue being that owners of the code base don't want GNU licensed parts being linked into their code base. Packaging and delivery also gets complicated - (as I understand it) LGPL components can't be delivered pre-linked, necessitating dynamic linking of the relevant libraries or supplying a GHC kit which the customer must use to assemble the product. This is all a significant drag. Also, wouldn't it be good to get HDBC into the Haskell Platform? - but we can't do this while it is LGPL can we? On the other side, what are the risks with adopting a BSD license? Is it that somebody could fork the library into a proprietary Haskell DB library that would compete with HDBC? Chris From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen@complete.org] Sent: 22 February 2011 19:55 To: Chris Dornan Cc: Haskell Cafe; Gershom Bazerman Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] HDBC's future and request for help On 02/22/2011 01:33 PM, Chris Dornan wrote:
Hi John,
Two thoughts: is there any prospect of making HDBC available under a BSD-like license? The LGPL license is a significant barrier for me and I expect it will be for others.
I'm happy to discuss this with people. It would be helpful to understand concrete cases where this would be a problem. I have permitted other code to be relicensed under BSD in the past and so don't have a huge hangup about this. If it's the best thing for the community, I'd be likely to do it. On the other hand, I have seen numerous cases over the years where BSD code has been taken by some company and essentially forked into a proprietary version. I feel this is not in the long-term interests of the community, and that drawback has to be weighed against any advantage.
And, along the lines of your own comments, the ODBC interface raises a significant (technical) barrier for MySQL users. Is there any chance that we can encourage/help getting the the MySQL driver closer to production quality?
The short answer is probably to send patches to its author or fork it. Or fund someone else to do so. -- John _____ No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 10.0.1204 / Virus Database: 1435/3457 - Release Date: 02/21/11