On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Malcolm Wallace
Libraries with non-BSD deps haven't been considered for the HP, and would be problematic, in my opinion.
I'd like to propose a policy along the lines that HP packages must be usable for developing software under any reasonable license including proprietary licenses.
I've been wondering whether there is any mileage in having a secondary, separate, "free" Platform, that is, containing only LGPL libraries and GPL tools. This way, it would be much easier to ensure that BSD libraries in the standard Platform do not depend inadvertently on LGPL'd libraries. If a Platform user wants to be unburdened from licensing worries, they can use the BSD Platform only. If they care about software freedom, then they can overlay the LGPL/GPL Platform on top.
And what of BSD libraries in the standard Platform that (would like to) deliberately depend on LGPL'd libraries? We have a concrete example: haskell-src-exts (BSD) depends on cpphs (LGPL), not as a tool but as a library. Cheers, /Niklas