"Simon Marlow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,

> Ross Paterson writes:
> 
> > Right: the documentation includes a summary of the copyright 
> > and licencing
> > information that is given precisely elsewhere, closer to the 
> > source code.
> > 
> > In the Haskell libraries, there is no clear indication of the 
> > licencing
> > of each individual module.  (There's a pointer to a file that contains
> > 4 BSD-like licences now, maybe 20 next year.)  No problem for people
> > who use the library as a whole, but it will be for people who want to
> > extract some modules and modify them for their own purposes.  At the
> > least we need to name the licences and mention the name in the License
> > field of the module header.  It would be a little bit of work now,
> > but it would be simple for new modules to follow.
> 
> I think on reflection that this approach will lead to confusion.  The
> original idea was to stick to a single BSD license for libraries/base,
> and I think that's what we should do.  
> 
> What do we need to do to make this happen?  I must admit this is one of
> the areas of licensing that I'm most confused about.  Should the single
> BSD license list *all* the copyright holders, or is it ok to list just
> one (say the University of Glasgow)?

IANAL, but I am pretty sure that you have to list all
copyright holders.  The BSD license doesn't put many
restrictions in place, but the two that it insists on is
that the copyright holder must be named and that the
disclaimer must remain intact.  So, I would think that you
need a disclaimer that lists all copyright holders, too.

The alternative may be to, after all, have individual
LICENSE files in the individual package subdirectories and
just have libraries/base/LICENSE the Glasgow license plus a
prominent remark at the top, which says that (a) individual
subdirectories have their own license files and (b) that all
code that hasn't got an explicit license is under the
Glasgow license.  (Technically, this is still incorrect, as
all kinds of people not affiliated with Glasgow University
have hacked the code and the copyright to that code belongs
to these individuals or their affiliations and not to
Glasgow University.)

AFAIK, the only way to simplify all this is to do as the FSF
and insist on written copyright assignments for all
contributions.  (And even this only works cleanly under US
law and maybe UK law, but not under continental European law
if I understand the situation correctly.)

Cheers,
Manuel
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