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

[Conrad Meyer]

On Wednesday 25 February 2009 07:47:16 am Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> 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


Alternatively Haskell could add shared library support, like every other 
language.

Regards,
-- 
Conrad Meyer <konrad at tylerc.org>