On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:37 +0200, Axel Simon wrote:
On Aug 5, 2009, at 10:16, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
On 4 Aug 2009, at 23:05, Don Stewart wrote:
I would appreciate input from the HaXml and HDBC authors (our most popular LGPL-licensed Haskell libraries) about what they feel the licensing issues/constraints should be for the Haskell Platform.
Licensing clarity is important for users I think. But equally some users may desire to use LGPL libraries too. Hence my suggestion that there be a separate platform of free/LGPL code (and GPL tools), which can depend on the proprietary-friendly BSD-licensed platform, but not the other way round.
I've not yet seen anyone publish something on how to satisfy LGPL for Haskell libraries.
The static-linking exception is the commonest means of working around ghc's technical limitations here. The exception is part of wxHaskell's license (but not Gtk2hs's), and HaXml (+polyparse on which it depends) has the exception too.
I don't think it would be much of a problem to weaken the license of Gtk2Hs to a BSD license. The underlying Gtk+ C library is, of course, LGPL but the C library can be linked in dynamically.
I think it'd probably be sufficient to use a static linking exception, like many other libs do. I don't think it's necessary to go all the way for a BSD license (unless it turns out that the community as a whole decides that the whole HP must be BSD and that LGPL with linking exception is not enough). Duncan