[Haskell-cafe] HDBC's future and request for help

[Chris Dornan]

Thanks John,

 

The simple answer is that I need to be able to use HDBC in proprietary
products and the LGPL makes this awkward - the most serious issue being that
owners of the code base don't want GNU licensed parts being linked into
their code base.  Packaging and delivery also gets complicated - (as I
understand it) LGPL components can't be delivered pre-linked, necessitating
dynamic linking of the relevant libraries or supplying a GHC kit which the
customer must use to assemble the product. This is all a significant drag.

 

Also, wouldn't it be good to get HDBC into the Haskell Platform? - but we
can't do this while it is LGPL can we?

 

On the other side, what are the risks with adopting a BSD license? Is it
that somebody could fork the library into a proprietary Haskell DB library
that would compete with HDBC?

 

Chris

 

 

From: John Goerzen [mailto:jgoerzen at complete.org] 
Sent: 22 February 2011 19:55
To: Chris Dornan
Cc: Haskell Cafe; Gershom Bazerman
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] HDBC's future and request for help

 

On 02/22/2011 01:33 PM, Chris Dornan wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Two thoughts: is there any prospect of making HDBC available under a
> BSD-like license? The LGPL license is a significant barrier for me and I
> expect it will be for others.

I'm happy to discuss this with people.  It would be helpful to
understand concrete cases where this would be a problem.  I have
permitted other code to be relicensed under BSD in the past and so don't
have a huge hangup about this.  If it's the best thing for the
community, I'd be likely to do it.  On the other hand, I have seen
numerous cases over the years where BSD code has been taken by some
company and essentially forked into a proprietary version.  I feel this
is not in the long-term interests of the community, and that drawback
has to be weighed against any advantage.

> And, along the lines of your own comments, the ODBC interface raises a
> significant (technical) barrier for MySQL users. Is there any chance
> that we can encourage/help getting the the MySQL driver closer to
> production quality?

The short answer is probably to send patches to its author or fork it.
Or fund someone else to do so.

-- John 

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