On 12 November 2010 18:58, Malcolm Wallace
since we have after all been shipping GPL tools and LGPL C libs along with ghc for some years.
Indeed. For many years, every program compiled by ghc (using libgmp to implement the unbounded Integer type) automatically fell under the terms of the LGPL. Is that still the case?
Yes. The IHG did some work to move the GMP dependency from the RTS to a new integer-gmp package. The base library now uses this package to implement the Integer type. It is also possible to use an alternative integer package but you have to rebuild base and the rest of the world. The default remains integer-gmp. It adds one more license to the list of about 10 others that you need to provide along with any compiled Haskell program that you distribute. In addition to most of us violating the BSD licence much of the time, I'm pretty sure that under a strict reading we're violating the licence of the H98 and FFI reports because we do not reproduced them in their entirety. Duncan