Yitzchak Gale:
Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
for me, GMP is much more problematic issue. strictly speaking, we
can't say that GHC is BSD-licensed because it includes LGPL-licensed
code (and that much worse, it includes this code in run-time libs)
Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
..binary distributions of GHC that include libgmp.a and statically
link it into compiled code... All
that is needed to make this legal is to (a)...
(b) give users access to another version of
the proprietary program that links GMP dynamically.
Wow, I didn't realize that. Now I understand Bulat. In a
project of any serious size and complexity, the use
of static or dynamic linking is often architechted in and
cannot be changed. So LGPL is really bad for a general
purpose compiler like GHC. We've got to make GMP
optional, or get rid of it.
Well, I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.
My point is that the LGPL is *no* reason to worry. As Isaac wrote,
there are a number of ways in which a vendor of a proprietary program
can successfully work with LGPL'ed code. My proposal of providing a
dynamically linked version of the software as an option is just one of
these ways (which I think is especially easy to realise). Other ways
include distributing the dynamically linked binary in the first place
and providing access to .o file to link with a different version of
the library (as Isaac outlined). BTW, when I write dynamically linked
binary I mean a binary that links dynamically to the LGPL'ed code (ie,
here GMP). All other libraries can still be linked statically.
As a case in point for my argument, please consider Apple. Mac OS X
contains a lot of GPL'ed and LGPL'ed code. Now you can argue that
that's a simpler situation because it's a whole OS and many of the
programs with GNU licenses are standalone, such as gcc. Now just for
fun, go to your nearest Apple store, grab an ipod touch and have a
look at its "Copyright" menu. There is lots of LGPL'ed code in there,
too. I am sure they had a trillion lawyers making sure that they
comply with the licence terms, so that the FSF is not going to come
after them.
Manuel
_______________________________________________
Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
