On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

The following hackage packages specify in their .cabal file:

license: BSD4

Which is the 4-clause BSD license, ie the one with the advertising clause.

cabal-upload-0.3 Chart-0.5 FiniteMap-0.1 haxr-3000.0.1 haxr-th-1.0 hbeat-0.1 htar-0.1 pcap-0.4.2 tar-0.1.1.1 unix-compat-0.1.2.1

Inspecting the LICENSE files for every one of these packages reveals that they actually use the 3-clause BSD license. Not a single hackage package really uses the 4-clause BSD license. In every case that it has been used it was just a confusion.

We therefore propose to deprecate BSD4 as a valid license in .cabal files: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/205

In the unlikely case that anyone really wants to use the 4-clause BSD license they can still specify "license: OtherLicense" and put the text in the accompanying LICENSE file.

Additionally, I propose to add the MIT license since there are a couple packages that really use that and allow optional versions on the licenses that are versioned, which includes the GPL and LGPL.

Looking at OtherLicense we find common ones are MIT, variations on BSD3 (2 clause and fewer, other informal variations), disjunctions of BSD3 / GPL (ie dual licensing), conjunctions of BSD3 / GPL (ie some bits user BSD some under GPL).

Hi Duncan, thanks for pointing that out. I've fixed the 6 out of those 10 that are mine. I must have gotten that wrong some time long ago and then just copied the .cabal file to new projects. Consider this a vote for deprecating BSD4. /Bjorn