[Haskell-cafe] short licensing question

[Felipe Lessa]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 10:24:22AM +0100, minh thu wrote:
> 2010/1/12 Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com>:
> > Any user can then perform the last step themselves and if they're really
> > lucky they might get that to work with a slightly modified version of
> > the LGPL'ed package. In practise of course this isn't that easy for the
> > user because GHC does not make it easy to make ABI compatible packages.
> > However it is my understanding that this procedure will comply with the
> > LGPL.
>
> In short, if I understand you correctly, you would just have to
> provide your code in unlinked form regardless of the existence of some
> tool to create another ABI-compatible version of the LGPL library.
>
> This alongside of the last discussion (which also roughly said you can
> license the code as you want when it is the client responsability to
> link the final binary) makes the (L)GPL quite useless (as a "freedom"
> keeper) whenever the code is made for specific clients...

I don't really follow.  GHC inlines aggressively between modules.
IMHO you would need to disable cross-module inlining.  This means
GHC would miss a lot of optimization oportunities.  Oh, well.

For example, if you use an LGPL concrete monad package and I want
to CPS transform it, then all primitive operations would have to
be changed.  That means *any* inlined code from this module would
change.  Are you saying that this kind of change would count as
"ABI incompatible change"?  And so LGPL would say nothing about it?

Am I missing something? :o)

Cheers,

--
Felipe.