Windar, GPL to LGPL, Erlang and Scala.

[Steven Robertson]

Hello

I had some real frustrations trying to get the LAN resolver working on
Windows, a while back, and I concluded that it is an Erlang issue
since the problem is well documented elsewhere but without any real
answers so far as I can see - suggesting more that Erlang is rough
around the edges, particularly on Windows.

I've also been trying to get my head around the licensing of Erlang
and GPL, which I've never been quite certain about but I've come to
the conclusion that Erlang can't be distributed with a GPL product,
and while I can change the license on Windar to LGPL that means that I
can't then bundle MPlayer with the installer - that probably doesn't
matter too much, but I was trying to make a user-friendly all-
inclusive installer for Playdar on Windows package.

Playdar has re-introduced me to functional programming, and given me a
real incentive to learn other programming languages. I've taken a look
at Erlang, Haskell, and F#. Scala has grabbed my interest most of all
because it allows me to use take advantage of the actor model and mix
imperative and functional programming styles with relative ease, and
access to the full range of libraries available in Java. It is also
quite close to Erlang and I'm a good way towards a full implementation
of the Playdar interfaces in Scala.

I've changed the license on the Windar source-code to LGPL, and I'm
now winding up Windar and will attempt to integrate the installer into
playdar-core under contrib. I'm not sure about whether or not having
Windar as something distinct from Playdar was ever a good idea, but
Windows is quite different from the *nix platforms and naturally a bit
different and I wonder about whether or not it should be maintained
that way. I'm open to ditching the windar.org domain and have the
installer hosted directly on the Playdar website, and the license
change helps with that so I'll go and sort out a new fork and send a
pull request when ready.

Cheers

Steve