Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Don Stewart]

malcolm.wallace:
>> As a Haskell Platform user, I really need the assurance that the
>> licensing situation is straightforward - especially if I'm to promote
>> Haskell at work :-)
>>
>> My vote would be that non-BSD/MIT license automatically excludes a
>> library from inclusion, even though it would exclude my own project.
>
> I wonder if it would be possible to split the Haskell Platform into two 
> parts, platform-BSD and platform-LGPL?  The LGPL packages could depend on 
> packages from platform-BSD, but not the other way around.  This would 
> guarantee at least one aspect of licence compliance, whilst also making 
> it clear to proprietary users that if they want to avoid the guarantee of 
> freedom, they can simply avoid installing platform-LGPL.
>

As an aside: are you aware of the problems using LGPL in the context of
GHC statically linking libraries by default (in that they degenerate to
GPL, or require significant extra workaround).

I'm concerned the burden for satisfying the LGPL while GHC statically
links Haskell libraries is too great to impose.

-- Don