On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 2:30 AM, Malcolm Wallace
<malcolm.wallace@cs.york.ac.uk> wrote:
On 5 March 2010 09:53, Magnus Therning <magnus@therning.org> wrote:
Now I'm even more confused. How is hosting on Hackage an issue in [1]?
I'm pretty sure it says nothing about organizations. If I threw a flash stick with a binary of a program I wrote over my cubicle wall to say, my coworker, Steve, and I tried to tell him he couldn't have the source to my binary that I created based on a GPL'd program on that stick, he could say I've infringed on his rights under the GPL.
Hackage is a means of distributing such code. Because Hackage has received the code from the author, it therefore has the same obligations (under the GPL, or BSD, or whatever) as any other recipient.
Hackage has no obligations unless it's an intelligent entity.
Hackage does not have to enforce the GPL, the author responsible for the perceived violation of the GPL must resolve it with the person claiming the violation, either by settling it inside or outside of court, by either making their code the GPL, or dealing with someone potentially bringing them in front of a judge.
In fact the people running Hackage have now become the same as the person I threw my flash drive over the cube wall to, and have the same rights as Steve.
To be clear, like any recipient, one treats the donor in good faith. That is, one believes the license granted by the author (or upstream distributor) is valid until notified otherwise. It is the author's responsibility to check, not Hackage's.
EXACTLY :-)
Now for a bit of personal reflection that you can ignore if you wish...
Wouldn't it be excellent if Google could tell us just how many times innocent mailing lists like haskell-cafe have to put up with confusion over the GPL? Every single open source project I've ever been on has had a mailing list that has had this problem in the last 15 years I've been active in open source communities, and it just keeps rearing it's ugly head.
It's really irritating and distracts people who'd rather be sharing their work with one another from doing so, completely thwarting the point of the FSF to begin with.
As such I've long since abandoned any love for any form of the GPL, and much prefer licenses like the BSD license.
Regards,
Malcolm