[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: dbus-core 0.6 and dbus-client 0.2

[John Millikin]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 16:00, Will Thompson <will at willthompson.co.uk> wrote:
> However, I can't find a way to feed a bytestring to dbus-core and get
> back a ReceivedMessage. Is this deliberately not exposed? While it's
> obviously not useful in general, it would be very useful for Bustle.
> (The alternative is to construct a fake connection to myself and feed
> messages down it, I guess.)
>
It's not exposed at the moment, because I didn't want to commit to a
public API until I knew it was going to work. When I get home tonight,
I'll add it to the API.

Aside from message marshal/unmarshal, are there any other bits of the
protocol which would be helpful to expose?

> Also, the Haskell bit of Bustle is licensed under the LGPL (v2.1 or
> later), but dbus-{core,client} are under the GPL v3. Could you be
> convinced to reconsider the licensing of your packages? D-Bus is often
> used to allow free and non-free applications to play nicely together,
> letting free software be used in situations where it would otherwise be
> passed over; while I for one don't plan to write any non-free D-Bus
> applications in Haskell any time soon, it'd be nice not to write Haskell
> off for such applications.
>
The following bit is just me being a free-software hippy, so take it
with a grain of salt, but:

There's already a DBus package for Haskell under the BSD 3-clause
license at <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/DBus>. It's a bit
awkward to use, because it's a binding to libdbus, but it exists.
dbus-core and -client offer developers ease of use in exchange for the
developers granting rights to their users.

Additionally, as far as I know, the teams porting DBus to Windows and
OS X haven't released anything stable / usable yet -- if somebody's
using DBus, it's probably on Linux, FreeBSD, etc. If any developers
want to develop proprietary software 1) for Linux/BSD 2) in Haskell 3)
using D-Bus, I'm sure both of them will take a break from rolling that
boulder uphill to ask about relicensing.

If it really is an issue -- ie, you'd be willing to use a
less-featured library to avoid the GPL -- then please reply and I'll
re-license. I don't want to negatively impact anybody else working on
free software. But I'd rather keep the license as strong as possible
until somebody actually needs it to be weakened.