Re: [Haskell-cafe] Dual-licensing the package on Hackage

One question is how much of a discovery/indexing role Hackage plays. There can be a tremendous difference in ease of obtaining a commercial license, and a restriction for "things I can use in a proprietary project, once I pay enough" seems like a legitimate use case. It also has some bearing on ease of contributing changes upstream - a project that is dual licensed will probably want well-documented transfer of ownership; a gpl only project may not. That said, I am less sure that Hackage needs to be the place to call that out. On Jul 30, 2013 2:51 AM, "Vo Minh Thu" wrote:

Well, if you are willing to grant me a GPL license when I download your package through Hackage, GPL is accurate.

Again you are not providing me with another license. Obtaining a commercial license should be seeked through other means, perhaps by sending you an email. I don't think Hackage should be used for making adverts, but I think it would be ok to state in the description of the package something along the lines of "commercial licenses are available through example.com".

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Thanks Thu,

I agree with you. Just I don't know what to write in the license field of the .cabal file: GPL or OtherLicense. The both choices seem correct to me and misleading at the same time.

Cheers, David

30.07.2013, в 12:53, Vo Minh Thu написал(а):

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2013/7/30 David Sorokin :

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Hi, Cafe!

Probably, it was asked before but I could not find an answer with help of Google.

I have a library which is hosted on Hackage. The library is licensed under BSD3. It is a very specialized library for a small target group. Now I'm going to relicense it and release a new version already under the dual-license: GPLv3 and commercial. In most cases GPL will be sufficient as

2013/7/30 David Sorokin : this is not a library in common sense.

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Can I specify the GPL license in the .cabal file, or should I write

OtherLicense?

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I'm going to add the information about dual-licensing in the

description section of the .cabal file, though.

Although you can indeed license your software under different licences, in the case of your question it doesn't seem to be a concern with Hackage:

The license displayed on Hackage is the one for the corresponding .cabal file (or at least I think it is). So you issue your new version with the changed license, the new version is available with the new license, the old versions are still available with the old license. Everything is fine.

Now about the dual licensing. It seems it is again not a problem with Hackage: you are not granting through Hackage such a commercial license. I guess you provide it upon request (for some money). I.e. when I download your library from Hackage, I receive it under the terms of the BSD (or GPL) license you have chosen, not under a commercial license that I would have to receive through other means.

Otherwise the semantic of the license field on Hackage would mean the library is available under such and such licenses, which are not granted to you when you download the library on Hackage. Only when you download the package you can actually find the licensing terms (e.g. in the LICENSE file). But this seems unlikely to me.

Cheers, Thu

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