Dear Simon,
I am happy to hear that ...
> We have a new license in the works, which will hopefully sort out the mess.
> Please bear with us.
This is good news: at the moment GHC cannot be included in the Debian
GNU/Linux distribution, for example, because of the mess, something I
personally regret: I think the functional programming community will
benefit greatly from real applications starting to appear in the Linux
world; with the just started GNOME/Haskell interface work this is within
reach.
In fact, as you may be aware, your use of several Gnu GPL'd source files
obliges you to grant at least the rights granted by the Gnu GPL for the
entire system (including permitting third parties to resdistribute modified
sources etc. and including permitting such third parties to charge a fee
for binaries even if they must offer the sources at the cost of the
handling).
A solution that has worked very well in the past is the solution adopted by
perl: to release with a short license that says "you may use the Gnu GPL or
the Artistic license at your discretion". This permits reuse of the code
in the most diverse ways which is, as far as I understand it from SPJ's
earlier remarks, what you want.
GHC has always been de-facto free to everyone: let me conclude by
applauding your choice of finally making that official :)
Cheers,
Kristoffer
--
Kristoffer H?gsbro Rose, phd, prof.associe <http://www.ens-lyon.fr/~krisrose>
addr. LIP, Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, 46 Allee d'Italie, F-69364 Lyon 7
phone +33(0)4 7272 8642, fax +33(0)4 7272 8080 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
pgp f-p: A4D3 5BD7 3EC5 7CA2 924E D21D 126B B8E0 <krisrose@{debian,tug}.org>
**** PS: See pictures of Sofus Albert H?gsbro on my web page cited above! ****
