[Haskell] Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: TextRegexLazy-0.56, (=~) and (=~~) are here

[Brian Hulley]

Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
> Announcing: TextRegexLazy version 0.56
> Where: Tarball from http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazy-regex
>        darcs get --partial [--tag=0.56]
> http://evenmere.org/~chrisk/trl/stable/ License : BSD, except for

Great! - Thanks for all your hard work in making this available to everyone!

> DFAEngine.hs which is LGPL (derived from CTK light)

I sense some possible problems coming...

[in another post]
>Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>> Hello Chris,
>>
>> Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 3:16:58 PM, you wrote:
>>
>>> Announcing: TextRegexLazy version 0.56
>>
>> your feature list is really strong! it will be great now to make it
>> a part of GHC standard distribution

Does the LGPL license for DFAEngine.hs use the static linking exception or 
not?

If so, and if it is desirable to allow LGPL code without the static linking 
exception into the standard lib distro, then perhaps a useful project for 
someone would be to write a Haskell program that traverses source for an app 
and builds an appropriate static library containing the object code for all 
non-LGPL modules, with debug info stripped etc so that it's obfuscated (this 
being the object that must also be distributed to satisfy the linkage 
requirements of the LGPL licences for the other modules + GMP math lib), and 
also makes a list of all the LGPL modules and creates a text file containing 
the total merged licence agreement that one needs to distribute with one's 
exe. Note however that unfortunately this might not solve the problem in the 
face of whole-program optimization unless the LGPL conditions would be 
satisfied by the ability to build a non-optimized app but I've a feeling 
(though I'm certainly not a lawyer or legal expert) that this might 
unfortunately be at bit optimistic.

I wonder what deviation from the code in DFAEngine.hs would be legally 
regarded as being "different" code so we could make the modifications and 
put a BSD3 licence on it. Should licences and other legal stuff (the ghosts 
of Ancient Rome which had their rightful place at a much earlier stage of 
human history) apply to type definitions, mathematical insights, functions 
etc in the first place? (Shakespeare's play "The Merchant of Venice" says it 
all)

On a more positive note, I note that the European Parliament voted (last 
year iirc) that software patents are just a lot of rubbish and are null and 
void in Europe so at least that's one tender bud of common sense that's 
managed to burst through the asphalt.

Regards, Brian.

-- 
Freedom has no strings attached.
Laws originate all the human misery on the planet.

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