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

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Sat Sep 27 07:48:27 EDT 2008


Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Freitag, 26. September 2008 09:24 schrieb Magnus Therning:
>   
>> Recently I received an email with a question regarding the licensing
>> of a module I've written and uploaded to Hackage.  I released it under
>> LGPL.  The sender wondered if I would consider re-licensing the code
>> under BSD (or something similar) that would remove the need for users
>> to provide linkable object files so that users can re-link programs
>> against newer/modified versions of my library.
>>     
>
> Since GHC does cross-package inlining, code of your library is directly 
> included (not just linked) into code that uses the library.  So I think that 
> every code that uses your library will have to be released und the GPL or 
> LGPL which is a very bad situation.
>
> People, don’t release Haskell libraries under the LGPL!
>   

That would be serious indeed, but before changing my ways I'd need more
information to back up your statement.  Could someone confirm that code
from one installed module can be inlined into another?

AFAIU you are saying that the linker is reaching into the module's .a
file, pulling out the .o file, and then reaching into that .o file to
pull out an individual function's ASM code.  I believe that's a bit more
than regular C linkers would do.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                             (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus@therning.org             Jabber: magnus@therning.org
http://therning.org/magnus

Haskell is an even 'redder' pill than Lisp or Scheme.
     -- PaulPotts


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url : http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20080927/d4e8f7db/signature.bin


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list