[Haskell-cafe] base-4 + gtk2hs-0.10.0 licensing

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

Am Mittwoch, 25. Februar 2009 14:33 schrieb Duncan Coutts:
> Note that some people will tell you that by a strict interpretation of
> the LGPL that statically linked Haskell libs under that license are a
> pain in the backside. When we decided on that license for gtk2hs that
> was not our intention. In other words nobody is going to sue you if you
> statically link gtk2hs libs. Of course if you need a cast iron legal
> guarantee then that's not good enough and you'd have to ship .a and .o
> files to let users relink if they wanted to.

I’m not sure whether this would be enough. .a and .o files are not compatible 
among GHC versions, as far as I know. Relinking against newer Gtk2Hs versions 
might not work. And a program using Gtk2Hs contains code from the .hi files 
of Gtk2Hs through inlining. So it’s not pure linking. However, the LGPL only 
allows linking, as far as I understand.

I want to repeat what I’ve said earlier on this list: For Haskell, there is no 
real difference between LGPL and GPL, as far as I understand it. If you don’t 
want to force the users of your library to use an open source license for 
their work then use BSD3 or a similar license for your library.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang