[Haskell-cafe] LGPL and Haskell (Was: Re: ANNOUNCE: tie-knot library)

[Michael Snoyman]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Colin Adams <colinpauladams at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 13 December 2012 08:09, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>
>> To take this out of the academic realm and into the real-life realm: I've
>> actually done projects for companies which have corporate policies
>> disallowing the usage of any copyleft licenses in their toolset. My use
>> case was a web application, which would not have been affected by a GPL
>> library usage since we were not distributing binaries. Nonetheless, those
>> clients would not have allowed usage of any such libraries. You can argue
>> whether or not this is a good decision on their part, but I don't think the
>> companies I interacted with were unique in this regard.
>>
>> So anyone who's considering selling Haskell-based services to companies
>> could very well be in a situation where any (L)GPL libraries are
>> non-starters, regardless of actual legal concerns.
>>
>
> Presumably you are talking about companies who want to distribute programs
> (a very small minority of companies, I would think)?
>

No, read my use case again. I was creating a web application for a company.
The company was not going to distribute my code in any way to their
clients. Nonetheless, the company had a corporate policy to not use *any*
copyleft licenses, and therefore I was unable to use a library such as
Pandoc. (I believe this policy affected me at two separate companies, but I
don't remember all the details tbh.)

I also don't think that distributing programs is as small a market as you
think, and should also be something we support for commercial users of
Haskell.

Michael
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