On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 01:15:28PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote:
Anything that excludes software that we could use, or otherwise discourages people from making software available to the community, is a bad idea. A restriction to OSF-approved licenses would exclude anything released under a Creative Commons license, since the OSF doesn't list those, which makes sense as they aren't "software licences" per se. And your restriction of "released under a license" would exclude public domain software - at least in countries that recognize such a thing.
Yes, these are nits, but these are nits that could cause someone to decide not to put software that is otherwise perfectly acceptable on Hackage.
Those restrictions would be, in my opinion, a good idea. Rejecting say CC-SA (CC0 is FSF approved), etc. code means rejecting licences with clear and documented problems in them, problems which would cause quite a lot of headaches down the road. Having to pick a licence from the bazillion ones [1] approved by the FSF or the OSI streamlines the choice and avoids licence creep with a minimal risk of scaring the uploader away. I must admit, as fr33domlover notes, that this problem isn't present in hackage as now (I yet have to meet a library not licenced as GPL/ MIT/BSD3), but after finding this gem on github <Software> may be used in commercial projects and applications with the one-time purchase of a commercial license. For non-commercial, personal, or open source projects and applications, you may use <Software> under the terms of the GPL v3 License. You may use <Software> for free. I say: "Better safe than sorry" ;) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_lic...