On 2015-02-28
Mike Meyer
There are open source projects that are systematically excising GPL'ed software because of the problems it shares with ShareAlike licenses. Should we disallow the GPL because some people have problems with it?
Making Hackage better to help users sort out which licenses they are willing to accept in their project - which I personally would like to do on a project-by-project basis! - is a solution to these problems. Restricting the licenses that are acceptable on Hackage to meet some arbitrary set of criteria is a knee-jerk.
The restrictions aren't arbitrary at all. They're based on ethics. On Software freedom. But sure, a package with invalid license tagging should instantly become unavailable. Here's a suggestion: We can talk about this forever, because there seem to be no official guidelines to really discuss. Why don't we put clear guidelines at hackage.haskell.org ? If these guidelines would be "proprietary software allowed", then there's a point to discuss. But if the guideline requires certain tagging - currently all the license tags except all-rights-reserved are free software licenses - maybe the problem is already solved. Who maintains the community hackage instance and the guidelines? Just to make sure these people are aware of this discussion. --- fr33domlover http://www.rel4tion.org/people/fr33domlover GPG key ID: 63E5E57D (size: 4096) GPG key fingerprint: 6FEE C222 7323 EF85 A49D 5487 5252 C5C8 63E5 E57D