#857: Decide what to do about licenses ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Reporter: duncan | Owner: Type: task | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.8.0.6 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: unknown | Ghcversion: Platform: | ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Currently you can specify some partial info about a license in the .cabal file. It's not exhaustive and does not cover all licenses. It seems originally intended so that common licenses will be given the same name (so no confusion over "bsd" =? "BSD"). There are a number of outstanding requests for new licenses to be listed (#854 BSD2 & ISC, #821 Apache). This is based on users expecting that most licenses they might want should be listed. The current alternative of course is that they just list it as `OtherLicense`. So this all comes down to what do we want the license field for, what is it's purpose, does it have any semantics? Currently we can't really say that it has any reliable semantics (even if the info were accurate), it's really just a way to stop people spelling "GPL" wrong. It also serves a purpose to indicate what are recommended licenses, to work against license proliferation. So, should we move to a more accurate license system where you can express more precisely the licensing terms? Apart from listing more licenses this would mean we have to tackle: * multiple licenses (conjunctive): the distributor has to comply with multiple licenses, e.g. because different parts of the code have different licenses. * dual licensing (disjunctive): the distributor gets to pick which license to use * GPL open ended versions: The GPL recommends that authors license under terms like "Version X or any later version". This is a special kind of dual licensing, it's the infinite disjunction of all later versions of the license and of course those later versions are mostly unknown so it'd have to be handled specially. Then there's the issue in the BSD licenses that there's hardly any standard BSD3 license, people make up all kinds of variations. The 2-clause license is not actually (properly) listed by the FSF or the OSI (bizarrely the OSI has it listed but with the wrong text). -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/857 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects