Proposal: module namespaces.

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Malcolm Wallace <Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk> wrote,

> Ashley writes:
> > Do you have any kind of guarantees of copyright openness in mind? In 
> > Java, everything under java.* is supposed to be owned by Sun.
> 
> All standard libraries will be copyright to their authors, but must
> be released under an open source licence.  (For instance Hugs at the
> very least will require the source.)  Ideally, I think they should
> all have the same licence.  We need to decide which.  LGPL?  BSD?
> Any opinions?

This depends a bit on what actually we mean by standard.  In
fact, I don't think that there can be only one standard.
There reason is the varying complexity of libraries and the
fact that some rely on other non-haskell libraries.

For example, the current modules in the Library Report are
really standard libraries in the sense that their interface
is set in stone and there is as far as technically possible
freely available code with absolutely no strings attached.

However, this is not going to work for large libraries like
HOpenGL or Gtk+HS.  Their interface will never be stable
simply because they have to track the changes in the
corresponding C library (and because they are so big that we
will always find mistakes in their interface).  Moreover, it
doesn't make much sense to require, e.g., that Gtk+HS comes
with a license that is less restrictive than LGPL, because
GTK+ is LGPL and we can't change this.

BTW, this is another reason that I think, Std. doesn't make
sense.  It's too inflexible.

> > Will it be standard practice for versions of Standard be included with 
> > Haskell compilers?
> 
> This is the intention.

Which immediately leads us to protability issues with
libraries that are not fully implemented in Haskell, but
rely on some external code.

Cheers,
Manuel