Manuel M T Chakravarty
Depends on the library. I agree with you that the really core stuff and in particular the "language extension"-related libraries should be completely unrestricted.
In particular, I would be unhappy to see the Hugs or GHC distributions change from being pure BSD license but I'd like to see all the major libraries come as part of the standard distribution. The "purity" aspect is as important as the choice of license - it is hard enough to understand one license but if you get a package which is covered by multiple licenses then you're pretty-much hosed. This was an issue we faced in releasing my component compiler: we wanted to release the whole thing under a BSD license but on careful inspection we found that the distribution contained emacs code covered by the GPL, a patched LaTeX library covered by the GPL, some code from the Hugs and GHC distributions (both covered by BSD but with different copyrights) and, of course, the main BSD-licensed compiler and documentation. This was really tedious and it took a long time to find a way of describing the license that conveyed the fact that 99% of the distribution and, in particular, all the tools, were BSD-licensed while a few non-essential parts were covered by more restrictive licenses. -- Alastair Reid reid@cs.utah.edu http://www.cs.utah.edu/~reid/