Re: [simonpj@microsoft.com: License]
On Thu, Jun 24, 1999 at 06:28:49PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> Am I hearing correctly?! Microsoft has agreed to license a piece of
> software under a DFSG-free license? Is this a first? Who's got the
> champagne?!
GHC has always been distributed freely with a silent agreement that is
typical for much academic research. Microsoft came into the picture only last
year, when the prime developer, Simon Peyton Jones, joined MS research
department.
So, all Microsoft did was agree to formalise in a license what had already
been informally true for years. And really Microsoft would not have been
able to propriatize it easily, as most of the code is copyrighted by Glasgow
University who had already agreed to this free license a few months ago.
So, it's not like Microsoft freed Word. But it's still something to
celebrate: we now have a free Haskell compiler - which happens to be the
best Haskell compiler in existance ;-)
--
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
"... memory leaks are quite acceptable in many applications ..."
(Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++, page 220)
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