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

[Magnus Therning]

Conrad Meyer wrote:
> 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.

As has already been discussed on this list, shared library support to
obtain substitutability of libraries is problematic in a language like
Haskell too, at least AFAIU. Just consider cross .o inlining...

(Using shared libraries in order to decrease system-wide memory
footprint of Haskell binaries is however a bit easier.)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus＠therning．org          Jabber: magnus＠therning．org
http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe

Haskell is an even 'redder' pill than Lisp or Scheme.
     -- PaulPotts

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