Hi Sarah,
I'd like to respond to your questions about licensing etc., at least
as far as Hugs is concerned. Our goal is to make our tools as widely
useful as possible, and with that in mind, we have been considering
matters of licensing very carefully. The most recent versions of
Hugs(*) are distributed under the Artistic license, which should make
it much easier for you to use Hugs than the previous license. My
sense is that we are quite likely to move to an even more liberal
license (specifically, something like "BSD without the advertising
clause"). That will most likely be decided next time the Hugs and GHC
folks get together this summer. After all, we're working hard to get
these two systems to talk to each other, so we might as well make sure
they have the same licensing conditions too!
We've received quite a lot of useful feedback about these issues
from several Hugs users with much more experience and knowledge
of Open source software than us, but would still welcome any further
input from both academic and commercial sectors.
Your project sounds exciting, and we'd be terribly disappointed if
the license we use either discouraged or prevented you from making
good use of Hugs to meet your goals. A successful application of
Hugs is good news for all of us! So, if our licensing conditions
do ever cause you or anyone else problems, then we would really like
to know so that we can fix them, and everyone can benefit.
Hope this helps!
All the best,
Mark
(*) The Hugs 98 prerelease, available from
http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/hugs/hugs98.html
If you're not familiar with the different kinds of license discussed
here, http://www.opensource.org/osd.html is a good source.
