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

[Simon Marlow]

Magnus Therning wrote:
> 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?

When optimisation is turned on, you have virtually no control over how 
much code GHC will copy from one module to another, which is why several 
people (me included) have expressed concerns about the use of an 
unmodified LGPL with Haskell code in the past.  I believe at one stage 
we even asked for clarification from the FSF, but I don't recall getting 
an answer.

Cheers,
	Simon