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

[Malcolm Wallace]

Interesting.  I'm not completely clear, when you say that your company distributes binaries to third-parties: do you distribute ghc itself?  Or just the product that has been built by ghc?

Regards,
    Malcolm

On 21 May 2015, at 10:16, Yitzchak Gale wrote:

> LGPL is well-known and non-acceptable here.
> 
> Show me some serious case law for Malcolm's
> customized LGPL and we can start talking.
> Other than that, explanations are not going to
> be helpful.
> 
> Thanks,
> Yitz
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 4:51 AM, Howard B. Golden
> <howard_b_golden at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 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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