[Haskell] My summer of code project: HsJudy

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 14:16 +0100, Brian Hulley wrote:
> Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > the Judy library itself:
> > http://judy.sf.net
> > http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/judy/Judy-1.0.3.tar.gz
> 
> I wonder if the authors of the library could be persuaded to make it 
> available under an Open Source license, because currently it is under the 
> very limiting restrictions (ie incomaptible with commercial development and 
> the "normal" Haskell library license) imposed by LGPL...

I don't really want to get into a licensing war but I don't think this
is really true. The LGPL is of course an open source licence. Plenty of
proprietary code is developed on top of LGPL C libraries, for example
everything that uses Gtk+ (like VMWare and Adobe PDF viewer).

I know some people take issue with using the LGPL for Haskell libraries
because of the linking problems. While it's easy to swap over a LGPL
C .so module it's rather harder for Haskell since there's no stable ABI.
However this is easy to overcome by adding an explicit exception. I've
seen at least one LGPL Haskell lib include such an exception.

Duncan