[Haskell-cafe] LGPL libraries

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 10:31 +0100, Udo Stenzel wrote:
> Neil Mitchell wrote:
> > As others have said though, I wouldn't worry overly about it. The
> > whole concept of static linking being wrong, but dynamic linking being
> > fine, when you can flip between the modes just by changing compiler,
> > is just silly. You don't infringe (or uninfringe) copyright with a
> > command line flag.
> 
> But you do infringe copyright by shipping a program including an LGPL'd
> library in such a way that the user cannot easily exchange said library
> for a newer version, thereby violating the LGPL in letter as well as in
> spirit.  (Duncan should have chosen another license if he intended to
> allow Gtk2Hs being linked to proprietary software and then distributed.)

Well actually LGPL is not to bad for that purpose, and since it's the
licence of GTK+ itself it keeps things simple. As Neil pointed out, this
is only a problem for current versions of GHC that do not support
dynamic linking and as several people have pointed out it's still quite
possible to abide by the licence and use static linking.

Once GHC supports dynamic linking on linux & windows (as it does
currently on OSX) I think people will stop worrying/complaining.

Duncan