[Haskell-cafe] Re: Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Tom Tobin]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Yitzchak Gale<gale at sefer.org> wrote:
> I agree with most of Alexander's many thoughtful comments
> about Don's list of potential additions to HP. But I
> disagree about pandoc.
[...]
> So yes, pandoc should definitely be included
> in the platform.

I should preface this by saying that while I'm an experienced Python
programmer, I'm *very* new to Haskell.

As I understand it, Pandoc is entirely under the GPL (not LGPL).  I'd
be very wary of accepting a GPL'd library as a blessed "standard"
library, since it would be completely unusable for non-GPL projects.
One of the nice things about the Python standard library is that you
know it's liberally licensed; a programmer can feel free to use it for
any project, whether proprietary or copyleft or otherwise.  I don't
think I'd feel comfortable using or recommending the Haskell Platform
if "batteries included" came with such a serious caveat.