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

[wren ng thornton]

On 12/13/12 3:14 AM, Colin Adams wrote:
> Presumably you are talking about companies who want to distribute programs
> (a very small minority of companies, I would think)?

Not at all. In addition to Michael's own rebuttal, I'll add my own. 
There are many companies which *fear* the L/GPL. The important thing to 
note here is this:

     The Actual Legal Requirements of Copyleft Licenses are IRRELEVANT.

This simple fact is consistently ignored by advocates of the GPL (of 
which I number myself, FWIW). The great majority of all software 
produced in the world is developed for in-house use, and thus would not 
be subject to any of the "bad" side effects from using copyleft 
software. And yet, in spite of this fact, there are a great many 
companies which have official policies forbidding the use of copyleft 
software.

Why is that? It's because companies have legal departments whose jobs it 
is to ensure that the company won't be destroyed by legal action. And 
because there isn't an extensive record of actual court rulings 
regarding purported violations of the GPL, lawyers are rightly wary of 
it. Companies do not (generally) avoid the GPL because of understanding 
its requirements and refusing to abide by them. Companies avoid the GPL 
because they do not know what it means! More particularly, because they 
do not know what the courts will think it means, and that's too much 
uncertainty to risk your company over. Any actual commercial burden 
imposed by the GPL re distributing software is beside the point. 
Corporate lawyers (for these companies) won't risk getting close enough 
to even evaluate what that burden would amount to.

-- 
Live well,
~wren