possible readline license problem with ghc and -package util

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Sven Moritz Hallberg <pesco@gmx.de> wrote,

> On Wednesday 12. June 2002 10:12, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
> > Knowing the GHC developers for quite a while (and having had
> > BSD versus GPL discussions with them before), my answer
> > would be that they are perfectly trustworthy, but suffer
> > from the common "BSD is more free than GPL" misconception[1].
> > Otherwise, they are perfectly nice guys (even if they have a
> > @microsoft.com address ;-)
> 
> I see the people being very nice. But there is the question whether MS would 
> draw them away from GHC if it desides to go full-scale with something based 
> on GHC. That would surely hit GHC hard. If they could just say, no, we're 
> here to stay, MS is paying us, but they just want to use the compiler we 
> make, not own it, I'd be perfectly fine.

That's an assurance beyond any license that you will rarely
get.  Even on a GPL'ed project, the company could always
drop the funding unless the company's core business depends
on that software.  From a research project, such as GHC, the
funding (= developer time) can always be cut.  On the other
hand, as long as there is continued interest in the
software, somebody is going to support it to some extent.

Manuel