#5266: Licensing requirements and copyright notices
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Reporter: houeland | Owner:
Type: feature request | Status: new
Priority: normal | Component: None
Version: | Keywords: copyright
Testcase: | Blockedby:
Os: Unknown/Multiple | Blocking:
Architecture: Unknown/Multiple | Failure: None/Unknown
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I'm not sure where or how to bring this up, but I figured I would inform
you that complying with the licensing requirements to distribute
executables programmed in Haskell (using GHC) seems to be tiresome.
I have a personal project written in Haskell and Lua, and I recently tried
to make sure that I comply with the necessary requirements to distribute
it. My result was a 1660-line copyright file
(http://www.houeland.com/kol/docs/copyright), which I believe is
excessive.
This mostly stems from the use of BSD-style licenses for libraries, which
require copyright notices to be reproduced for redistributions in binary
form.
Many of them are based on code from the GHC project + the Haskell 98
Report + the Haskell Foreign Function Interface specification. I think it
would be nice if at least those parts could clearly be distributed using
only one reproduction of the GHC license (including allowing derived
binary forms to not include the restrictions against claiming to be
definitions of the Haskell 98 Language / Foreign Function Interface).
Currently the GHC-based libraries have licenses that say they're derived
from GHC and include the GHC license notice. The libraries are listed as
BSD3 in cabal files, but it's not clear to me that the statement actually
covers licensing for the entirety of the library (developments after the
split), and whether all GHC-based libraries can currently be distributed
using a single copyright notice.
Generally, many of the other available Haskell libraries also seem to use
BSD-style licenses, which can be a hassle to comply with for binary
redistributions, mostly when dependencies also use separate BSD-style
licenses that must be included. Having a 'default' license in the Haskell
community that's similar to Boost or zlib instead of BSD3 might be
preferable for the many smaller libraries available. Many of the libraries
actually have different licenses (but similar ones such as MIT, or people
modifying parts of their license file) while being listed as BSD3 in cabal
files.
I don't know exactly what you can do about this, but an easier licensing
landscape for binary redistributions would certainly be nice. (And
possibly tools for automatically listing licensing restrictions and
producing copyright notices accurately.)
--
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5266>
GHC <http://www.haskell.org/ghc/>
The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
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