[Haskell-cafe] Re: GPL answers from the SFLC (WAS: Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1)

[Maciej Piechotka]

On Sat, 2010-03-06 at 00:28 +0100, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 4. März 2010 18:57:03 schrieb MightyByte:
> > Interesting.  It seems to me that the only solution for the
> > BSD-oriented haskell community is to practically boycott GPL'd
> > libraries.  From what I understand, this is exactly what the LGPL is
> > for.  I've known the basic idea behind the GPL/LGPL distinction for
> > quite awhile, but I didn't realize that mistaking the two had such
> > far-ranging consequences.  Since GPL seems to be the big elephant in
> > the room, it seems very easy to make this mistake.  At the very least
> > we should try to educate the community about this.
> 
> To my knowledge, the LGPL only allows *linking* with non-(L)GPL software. But 
> GHC doesn’t just link but performs massive cross-module inlining. So in my 
> opinion, LGPL is not a solution, too. Use BSD3!
> 
> Best wishes,
> Wolfgang

IANAL but it means you cannot distribute binaries using LGPL library
compiled with GHC without providing sources as LGPL explicitly ask that
the user have to have capability of relinking against new version of
library.

I.e.:
- If you use other compiler which did not use massive cross-module
inlining if is OK to use library.
- If you publish sources - on any licence as long as the user can
compile them against different version of library - it is OK (it does
not have to be open source). It can have any ND licenses etc. you want.
- If you prevent in any way the massive cross-module inlining then it is
OK as well

Regards

PS. There is also GPL-with-linking-exception which allows linking etc.
but does not require relinking capability. I'd believe that in such case
the cross-module inlining is not a problem since it is 'linking' for
compiler.

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