On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 08:59 +0100, Ketil Malde wrote: > I disagree - the linked executable must, but not the wrapper by itself. > It's source code, i.e. text, thus a creative work, and therefore > covered by copyright - on its own.
You're certainly right from a legal standpoint. But being right doesn't actually matter. The instant anyone actually compiles an application that uses your library, however indirectly, they are bound by the terms of the underlying library as well. So your bindings are effectively covered by the underlying license anyway (unless you're choosing a license for the sake of people who will never produce any usable end result...) Sure you could attach yet another license; but unless you deliberately intend to be even more restrictive, there's no reason whatsoever to license the thin bindings layer differently from the library it is binding to. Doing so would just be potentially misleading people about the licenses they need to comply with, especially when the bindings are to libraries that are not packaged with Cabal and do not have a uniform place to record their license terms. > So this may be a problem for distributions, which ship compiled and > linked binaries. But generally not for authors, darcs repositories or > Hackage, which only ship source code. Of course it is a concern for authors! Do you really think authors write libraries, and then just don't care whether potential users can actually use them? If you don't expect anyone to ever link a program, even indirectly, against your library, then you probably shouldn't have bothered distributing it; but if you do expect that, then you typically make choices when developing an application based on what rights you want *those* people to have. The reasonable expectation in Haskell is that they'll probably statically link; and you should read licenses of your dependencies, and carefully choose dependencies, accordingly. -- Chris Smith _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe