[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1

Tom Tobin korpios at korpios.com
Tue Dec 8 18:55:55 EST 2009


On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo
<mle+hs at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> Tom Tobin wrote:
>> I can write the SFLC and pose a hypothetical situation that captures
>> the gist of what we're talking about, and post the response here, if
>> anyone is interested.
>
> I suggest that you put together a question, post it here for comments
> and when there is some form of concensus pass the question on the the
> SFLC.

This sounds good to me; I don't think any of us are lawyers, but if we
have lawyers available to ask questions for free, let's take advantage
of it.

I'm thinking something along these lines:

Myself and several other members of a mailing list for a particular
programming language were recently discussing a situation where a
BSD-licensed work required a GPL'd library.  The ensuing discussion
led to much confusion all around, as we've all read various
(different!) things regarding honoring the GPL, and even where we've
read the same thing, we took away different conclusions.  We came up
with a list of questions that would help us understand the matter
better, and we were hoping you could help us answer them.

The background situation: X is a library distributed under the GPL.  Y
is another library that uses that library and requires it in order to
compile and function.

1) Is there any scenario where Y can be distributed under a non-GPL
license (e.g., the BSD)?

2) If so, what would Y's author need to do (or *not* do)?

3) If Y must be released under the GPL under the above scenario, and
someone subsequently wrote library Z, an API compatible replacement
for X, and released it under the BSD license, would Y's author now be
permitted to release Y under the BSD?

(Feel free to add more questions, and/or suggest tweaks.)


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