Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 15:37 +0200, Axel Simon wrote:
> On Aug 5, 2009, at 10:16, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> 
> > On 4 Aug 2009, at 23:05, Don Stewart wrote:
> >>
> >> I would appreciate input from the HaXml and HDBC authors (our most
> >> popular LGPL-licensed Haskell libraries) about what they feel the
> >> licensing issues/constraints should be for the Haskell Platform.
> >
> > Licensing clarity is important for users I think.  But equally some  
> > users may desire to use LGPL libraries too.  Hence my suggestion  
> > that there be a separate platform of free/LGPL code (and GPL  
> > tools), which can depend on the proprietary-friendly BSD-licensed  
> > platform, but not the other way round.
> >
> >> I've not yet seen anyone publish something on how to satisfy LGPL
> >> for Haskell libraries.
> >
> > The static-linking exception is the commonest means of working  
> > around ghc's technical limitations here.  The exception is part of  
> > wxHaskell's license (but not Gtk2hs's), and HaXml (+polyparse on  
> > which it depends) has the exception too.
> 
> I don't think it would be much of a problem to weaken the license of  
> Gtk2Hs to a BSD license. The underlying Gtk+ C library is, of course,  
> LGPL but the C library can be linked in dynamically.

I think it'd probably be sufficient to use a static linking exception,
like many other libs do. I don't think it's necessary to go all the way
for a BSD license (unless it turns out that the community as a whole
decides that the whole HP must be BSD and that LGPL with linking
exception is not enough).

Duncan