possible readline license problem with ghc and -package util

[John Meacham]

honestly, if microsoft decided to release 'Visual Haskell' and pulled
the development away from ghc, the resulting rise in haskell popularity
and the size of community would probably cause more than enough random
programmers to take a serious interest in contributing to the free
projects to make up for it. In fact, i could think of nothing better
(from a pragmatic point of view) for helping haskells acceptance.
	John

On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 10:15:20AM +0200, Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:
> On Thursday 13. June 2002 03:12, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Dang, thought I was done... ;)
> But this answer seems important.
> 
> I wasn't talking about simply dropping the funding. I meant pulling the 
> developers from the open project into a closed one with the same goal, which 
> of course will be based on the open project. This could quite likely mean a 
> fatal blow to free GHC, in favour of a big "professional" product. That's a 
> real danger, I'm just trying to point that out. Please don't get me wrong, 
> I'm not trying to attack anyone, nor am I expecting any action, like 
> relicensing GHC or anything. I've already got an answer from Simon, which I 
> beleive weighs enough. _But_ his answer "I'm not aware of any plans,
> at Microsoft or otherwise, to create a non-free fork of GHC" does not at all 
> mean that the danger I'm pointing at is no longer there. I'm absolutely not 
> blaming Simon for it though. It's really hard for me to try not to insult 
> anyone. I'll shut up now, I've made my point.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net
---------------------------------------------------------------------------