Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 4:59 AM, Ketil Malde wrote:

Tom Tobin writes:

...

If it turns out that Hakyll *is* okay to be BSD3 licensed so long as neither any binary nor the GPL'd work's source is distributed under non-GPL terms, well ... I'll say that the meaning of "BSD licensed" will have become much less reliable, since it means you actually have to trace the genealogy of the libraries you use *all* the way back in order to understand the situation for certain.

How so?  To me it's the exact converse: if the author of Hakyll may *not* distribute his work under the BSD license, just because it is intended to be linked with some GPL code, this complicates issues tremendously.

For instance, it would mean that businesses which may be writing proprietary software can't assume they can freely use a liberally licensed (e.g., BSD3) library — which would *completely* go against the prevailing understanding of liberally licensed software. Tainting your software with a GPL dependency without realizing it is a terrifying prospect (and certainly one of the questions I'd now like to pose to the SFLC).