The next step

Manuel M. T. Chakravarty chak@cse.unsw.edu.au
Sat, 26 May 2001 17:31:27 +1000


"Simon Marlow" <simonmar@microsoft.com> wrote,

>   - License: I'd prefer to specify a BSD-style (without advertising
>     clause) license, with copyright on individual files remaining with
>     the authors.  GPL code creates particular problems for us here,
>     so I'm keen to avoid it if possible.

I don't think that it is a good idea to specify a license.
For example, I am convinced that the (L)GPL is the better
licence for the community.  Incidentally, the GPL is also
the license of one of the most successful free software
projects ever - Linux - which is certainly also one of the,
if not *the* commercially most successful free software
project.  So, I don't buy this GPL is bad for companies
propaganda.  In that context, I recommend to read

  http://perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html

Anyway, while I am happy to discuss my position with anybody
who is interested, I don't want to start a big licence
discussion here.  All in all, I think, we should let authors
chose their license.

I am sorry (honestly) if that creates a problem for you, but
on the other hand, I am not keen on having a particular
company influence our licencing policies - certainly not in
something which we want to sell as a standard to the
community.

>   - Let's aim for HaskellDoc long term, but since we're not close to
>     arriving at a proposal for the documentation syntax we shouldn't
>     wait for it - libraries can be converted to HaskellDoc later.

Absolutely.

> For the centralised source repository we can use cvs.haskell.org, with a
> new 'libraries' module; library owners can be given accounts to maintain
> their own libraries.  The source tree will need build systems for the
> different compilers (for GHC I'll probably arrange things so that
> libraries can be grafted onto fptools/ and use the build system there).

Don't libraries need their own build system anyway if they
are to be portable?

How do we want to handle libraries (eg, Gtk+Haskell) that

* are in a different repository (Gnome repository) and/or

* need special tools (C->Haskell)?

Cheers,
Manuel