Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Axel Simon]

On Aug 5, 2009, at 16:59, Isaac Dupree wrote:

> Simon Marlow wrote:
>> On 05/08/2009 14:58, Axel Simon wrote:
>>>
>>> On Aug 5, 2009, at 15:44, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>>>
>>>>> I don't think it would be much of a problem to weaken the  
>>>>> license of
>>>>> Gtk2Hs to a BSD license.
>>>>
>>>> Don't forget you would need to obtain the consent of all  
>>>> contributors,
>>>> whose patches are also under the LGPL.
>>>
>>> True, but if I propose a discussion period on our mailing list  
>>> during
>>> which people can object, then I think that would be sufficient.
>> I think strictly speaking you have to get explicit consent, rather  
>> than the absence of objection.
>
> which GHC and the other BSD-components don't technically get, but  
> it's strongly implied by submitting a patch.  Similar for LGPL 
> +exception (technically a contributor would be allowed to  
> distribute a patch under just LGPL, or just GPL, or even GPL-2-only  
> or GPL-3-only if they were silly).  Socially, patches are generally  
> assumed to be the same as the source license...
>
> Can we get a list of all the Gtk2Hs code-contributors? (in which if  
> a person only ever submitted less than a dozen lines of significant  
> patches, it's probably not copyright significant)  Also, does  
> anyone here have an argument against trying to relicense?  (and is  
> it allowed, or is Gtk2Hs a "derivative work" of Gtk+ even when  
> distributed separately?... I think it *ought* to be allowed in this  
> particular circumstance, it wouldn't hardly be against the spirit  
> of LGPL since Gtk2Hs is mainly simply a binding, but I'm not a  
> lawyer :-)

When I re-implemented a binding for Gtk+, I chose LGPL because Manuel  
Chakravaty used LGPL for his Gtk+Hs binding. I did have a few  
requests to move to a BSD license from people who wanted to ship  
commercial Haskell applications.

We once moved from version 2 of LGPL to version 3 at least for some  
or our code and we have tried to get consent from the relevant people  
before which was no big deal. Thus, I don't think it is a big problem  
unless people are in for an ideological license debate.

Axel.