[Haskell-cafe] GPL answers from the SFLC (WAS: Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1)

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi Magnus

The 'Why not LGPL' doesn't cover the particular argument here:

> using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs.

The particular concern we have here is quite specific, considering
(-->) to be a dependency, can Hackage libraries under BSD3 that depend
on libraries under GPL?

[1] App --> libBSD3 --> libGPL


Any App built has to incorporate the GPL library - so the App has to
be GPL. -- No dispute --.

Similar BSD3 is a GPL compatible library, so this dependency chain
would be legal:

[2] App --> libGPL --> libBSD

The argument is whether it is legal to distribute (read host on
Hackage) BSD3 libs that depend on GPL libs - formulation [1].


--

I'd have thought Harmony would be problematic for different reasons -
i.e. coping the API of a copyright work.

Best wishes

Stephen