[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hmm, what license to use?

[Simon Marlow]

brian wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:54 PM, Stefan Monnier
> <monnier at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>>> That still leaves anyone free to use LGPL if they want to, but please
>>> don't assume that it allows commercial use by all potential users.
>> It *does* allow commercial use.  Your example just shows that some
>> people may decide not to take advantage of it, based not on problematic
>> restrictions but just on paranoia.
> 
> I was confused and worried about this subject lately, too; at some
> point in the future, I may want to ship closed-source commercial
> software that uses various LGPL libraries. But it doesn't seem to be
> as big a problem as I imagined. My understanding is that I can satisfy
> the requirements of the LGPL by dynamically linking, and that's
> already happening.

Dynamic linking doesn't solve all the problems, we still have the 
problem that GHC does a lot of cross-module inlining, regardless of 
whether dynamic linking is used.  However, I really would like to have a 
way to have complete control over what is exposed across a package 
boundary.  We need this not just for licensing reasons, but also for 
making a dynamic library with a fixed ABI, so it can be upgraded later.

Incedentally the lack of this feature is one reason I've not being 
rushing to get shared libraries into GHC.  They're just not that useful 
unless you can upgrade a library independently of the things it depends on.

Cheers,
	Simon