The next step

[Alastair David Reid]

Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak@cse.unsw.edu.au> writes:

> Depends on the library.  I agree with you that the really core stuff
> and in particular the "language extension"-related libraries should
> be completely unrestricted.

In particular, I would be unhappy to see the Hugs or GHC distributions
change from being pure BSD license but I'd like to see all the major
libraries come as part of the standard distribution.

The "purity" aspect is as important as the choice of license - it is
hard enough to understand one license but if you get a package which
is covered by multiple licenses then you're pretty-much hosed.  

This was an issue we faced in releasing my component compiler: we
wanted to release the whole thing under a BSD license but on careful
inspection we found that the distribution contained emacs code covered
by the GPL, a patched LaTeX library covered by the GPL, some code from
the Hugs and GHC distributions (both covered by BSD but with different
copyrights) and, of course, the main BSD-licensed compiler and
documentation.  This was really tedious and it took a long time to
find a way of describing the license that conveyed the fact that 99%
of the distribution and, in particular, all the tools, were
BSD-licensed while a few non-essential parts were covered by more
restrictive licenses. 

-- 
Alastair Reid        reid@cs.utah.edu        http://www.cs.utah.edu/~reid/