On 15 Dec 2012, at 16:54, Michael Snoyman wrote:
> I would strongly recommend reconsidering the licensing decision of cpphs.
> Even if the LICENSE-commercial is sufficient for non-source releases of
> software to be protected[1], it introduces a very high overhead for companies
> to need to analyze a brand new license. Many companies have already decided
> BSD3, MIT, and a number of other licenses are acceptable.
Well, if a company is concerned enough to make an internal policy on open
source licences at all, one might hope that they would perform due diligence on
them too. For instance, the FSF have lawyers, and have done enough legal work
to be able to classify 48 licences as both "free" and GPL-compatible, a further
39 licences as "free" but non-GPL-compatible, and 27 open source licences that
are neither "free" nor GPL-compatible. This kind of understanding is what
lawyers are supposed to be for. Making them look at another (short) licence is
not really a big deal, especially when it closely resembles BSD, which they
have already supposedly decided is good.
My suspicion, though, is that most of the companies who even think about this
question are small, do not have their own lawyers, and are making policy on the
hoof, motivated purely by fear. I also suspect that they do not even have the
resources to read the licence for each library in its entirety, to determine
whether it is in fact BSD3 or MIT, as claimed, or whether someone has subtly
altered it. Also, I think I could be pretty confident that there are many
shipping products that contain genuine BSD-licensed code, but which do not
comply with its terms.
> It could be very difficult to explain to a company, "Yes, we use this
> software which says it's LGPL, but it has this special extra license which,
> if I'm reading it correctly, means you can't be sued, but since the author of
> the package wrote it himself, I can't really guarantee what its meaning would
> be in a court of law."
Like I say, if someone claims the software to be BSD-licensed, someone has to
read the licence text itself anyway, to determine whether the claim is true.
Pretty much every copy of the BSD licence text differs anyway, at least by the
insertion of the authors' names in various places, and sometimes there are
varying numbers of clauses.
> Looking at the list of reverse dependencies[2], I see some pretty heavy
> hitters. Via haskell-src-exts[3] we end up with 75 more reverse dependencies.
> I'd also like to point out that cpphs is the only non-permissively-licensed
> dependency for a large number of packages.
I'm glad that cpphs is widely used. I'm also glad that it remains free, and I
disagree with you that its dual-licence model is non-permissive.
I would like to encourage more Haskell developers to adopt free licensing.
Don't be bullied by BSD evangelists! BSD is not the only way to a good citizen
of the community! Your libraries can be delivered to clients as products,
without you having to give up all rights in them!
It's not like I'm saying to companies "if you make money out of my code, you
have to pay me a fee". All I'm saying, to everyone, is "if you notice a bug in
my code and fix it, tell me". This is fully compatible with allowing people to
release my code to their clients inside products.
> I can give you more detailed information about my commercial experience
> privately. But I can tell you that, in the currently situation, I have
> created projects for clients for which Fay[4] would not be an option due to
> the cpphs licensing issue.
If you are complaining about the crazy policies that many companies adopt about
the use of free software within their business, then I have plenty of sympathy
for that too. I know of one which has a policy of "no use of open source code
whatsoever", but runs thousands of linux servers. :-) Also, many companies
with large numbers of software engineers on staff apparently prefer to buy
crappy commercial products and pay handsomely for non-existent support, instead
of running high-quality open-source software with neither initial nor ongoing
costs, and where bugfixes are often available the same day as you report the
bug. But hey ho. Corporate policy is usually made by people with neither
technical nor legal expertise.
As regards cpphs, if you don't want to use it because of its licences, that is
your choice. You can always use some other implementation of the C
pre-processor if you wish. GHC has always refused to distribute cpphs, on the
basis of its GPL licence, and instead chose to distribute GNU's gcc on Windows.
:-) (I hope you see the irony!)
Regards,
Malcolm
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