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

[Clark Gaebel]

Outside of the Valley and FOSS movement, programs are still usually
distributed as binaries.

For example, I have a secret, dirty desire to write a game in Haskell. This
would be closed source, and if I'd have to rewrite most of the supporting
libraries, it would be a nonstarter.

Plus, it's hard enough advocating for Haskell adoption because "it's hard"
or "less experienced developers won't get it". It'd rather not add "the
entire ecosystem is GPL, and there's no dynamic linking" to that list if I
could avoid it.

   - Clark


On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 3:14 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)?
>
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