> No I am not renouncing all copyright. By "public domain" I mean freely
> available for anyone to use for any purpose other than making money
> by selling the compiler itself. That isn't a formal definition,
> but I'm sure you see the intent.
>
> I have carefully avoided getting tangled up in legal red tape, which
> is why there is no formal license. It may be that my move to Microsoft
> will force me to spend time sorting this out. But it's never been
> a problem so far, and I doubt it will in the future, so I'm reluctant
> to invest the time until pressed to do so.
Popular free software CD-ROM distributions such as Debian GNU/Linux
disagree with you: they have refused for years to include software
such as GHC and Hugs, due to licensing/redistribution worries.
Thus, licensing problems have been hindering the distribution and use
of Haskell, and, what is worse, more within relatively active
communities such as GNU/Linux. Only NHC has a reasonable license,
stating that the software is freely redistributable and modifiable.
GPLing GHC would prevent commercial exploitation and better spread
Haskell. Even if you ended up having regrets, you would have nothing
to worry about since you as the _copyright holder_ could just release
a new version under any license you fancied.
A more traditional fix would be the XFree86 license. It involves a
higher risk of commercial exploitation, but in practice, how bad could
that be, given the widespread distribution it would encourage? The
risk would be especially small within the free software community.
I've tacked on to the end of this message the short XFree86 license.
Regardless of what you do, thank you for GHC!
Bake
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