Replacement for GMP: Update

[Brian Hulley]

Florian Weimer wrote:
> This is the offending part:
>
> * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
> software
> *    must display the following acknowledgement:
> *    "This product includes cryptographic software written by
> *     Eric Young (eay at cryptsoft.com)"
> *    The word 'cryptographic' can be left out if the rouines from the
> library
> *    being used are not cryptographic related :-).

I would find this a real problem. Not because I wouldn't gladly acknowledge 
contributions in the text of the license to be distributed with the binary, 
or in the Help->About dialog box in the program, but because I wouldn't want 
to have to list contributions in "all advertising materials" eg an 
advertisement for one's program in a magazine etc - it would just make the 
product look amateurish as well as giving undue importance to just one of 
the many people whose work it was making use of.
Also, what if your company made a T-shirt with a character from a computer 
game you're developing using Haskell - such legal smallprint would totally 
spoil the effect... ;-)

Therefore I'd recommend that licenses for code used by GHC runtime should be 
either BSD or public domain.

If the FFI was used for bignum then (talking about Windows OS for the 
moment) the bignum implementation could just be supplied as a C DLL, perhaps 
even several different C DLL's for people to choose which one they wanted to 
distribute with their program based on speed vs licencing issues. Eg if GMP 
was in a DLL then it would be sufficient to just supply gmp.dll + the gmp 
LGPL as two files along with the app binary and licensing issues would 
disappear afaiu. Another advantage of this direction would be that any 
slowness in the FFI would have to be ironed out, leading to a faster FFI 
which would be good for other things too eg matrix libs, graphics libs etc. 
Finally, separating bignum out of GHC runtime would make GHC runtime leaner 
therefore (hopefully)easier to maintain.

Of course this depends on whether or not an FFI implementation of bignum 
would be fast enough compared to directly coding it in the runtime.

(If you choose the DLL method I'd recommend incorporating the GHC version 
number into the name of the DLL to avoid DLL conflicts eg ghc-6.4.2 would 
use gmp-6.4.2.dll etc)

Anyway good luck with whatever way you choose,

Regards, Brian.
-- 
Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose.
Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past,
congealed in the present in unthought forms,
strive mightily unseen to destroy us.

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