Malcolm Wallace
Ashley writes:
Do you have any kind of guarantees of copyright openness in mind? In Java, everything under java.* is supposed to be owned by Sun.
All standard libraries will be copyright to their authors, but must be released under an open source licence. (For instance Hugs at the very least will require the source.) Ideally, I think they should all have the same licence. We need to decide which. LGPL? BSD? Any opinions?
This depends a bit on what actually we mean by standard. In fact, I don't think that there can be only one standard. There reason is the varying complexity of libraries and the fact that some rely on other non-haskell libraries. For example, the current modules in the Library Report are really standard libraries in the sense that their interface is set in stone and there is as far as technically possible freely available code with absolutely no strings attached. However, this is not going to work for large libraries like HOpenGL or Gtk+HS. Their interface will never be stable simply because they have to track the changes in the corresponding C library (and because they are so big that we will always find mistakes in their interface). Moreover, it doesn't make much sense to require, e.g., that Gtk+HS comes with a license that is less restrictive than LGPL, because GTK+ is LGPL and we can't change this. BTW, this is another reason that I think, Std. doesn't make sense. It's too inflexible.
Will it be standard practice for versions of Standard be included with Haskell compilers?
This is the intention.
Which immediately leads us to protability issues with libraries that are not fully implemented in Haskell, but rely on some external code. Cheers, Manuel