SV: [Haskell-cafe] RFC: "Native -XCPP" Proposal

[Howard B. Golden]

Hi Yitzchak,

I believe there are good explanations of open source licenses aimed at lawyers and management. I don't think their fears are well-founded. If you work for a timid company that isn't willing to learn, you should consider going elsewhere. You may be happier in the long run. 

Respectfully,

Howard

> On May 20, 2015, at 7:39 AM, Yitzchak Gale <gale at sefer.org> wrote:
> 
> The license issue is a real concern for any company using
> GHC to develop a product whose binaries they distribute to
> customers. And it is concern for GHC itself, if we want
> GHC to continue to be viewed as a candidate for use in
> industry.
> 
> The real issue is not whether you can explain why this
> license is OK, or whether anyone is actually going to the
> trouble of building GHC without GMP.
> 
> The issue is the risk of a *potential* legal issue and its
> potential disastrous cost as *perceived* by lawyers and
> management. A potential future engineering cost, no
> matter how large and even if only marginally practical,
> is perceived as manageable and controllable, whereas a
> poorly understood potential future legal threat is perceived
> as an existential risk to the entire company.
> 
> With GMP, we do have an engineering workaround to side-step
> the legal problem entirely if needed. Whereas if cpphs were
> to be linked into GHC with its current license, I would be
> ethically obligated to report it to my superiors, and the
> response might very well be: Then never mind, let's do the
> simple and safe thing and just rewrite all of our applications in
> Java or C#.
> 
> Keeping the license as is seems to be important to Malcolm.
> So could we have an option to build GHC without cpphs
> and instead use it as a stand-alone external program?
> That would make the situation no worse than GMP.
> 
> Thanks,
> Yitz
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