All, Hackage has of course always been for open source Haskell software (and has always rejected "AllRightsReserved" packages). Prompted by this recent discussion, Gershom, SPJ, and the hackage admins have come up with a few changes to make our current implicit open source policy a bit more explicit: * The hackage homepage will say "Hackage is the Haskell community's central package archive of open source software." * The signup and upload pages will have a new blurb on open source licenses. See below. * We will accept a patch along the lines of https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2015-March/010019.html to continue to reject "AllRightsReserved" on hackage (though we may move the check from cabal into hackage). * And on a somewhat related topic: we will finish the discussion on hackage trustee guidelines (mostly about editing package metadata) and post them. https://github.com/haskell/hackage-server/commit/66a7acd125d486e55bb66743589... Here's the new blurb: Open source licenses The code and other material you upload and distribute via this site must be under an open source license. This is a service operated for the benefit of the community and that is our policy. It is also so that we can operate the service in compliance with copyright laws. The hackage operators do not want to be in the business of making judgements on what is and is not a valid open source license, but we retain the right to remove packages that are not under licenses that are open source in spirit, or that conflict with our ability to operate this service. (If you want advice, see the ones Cabal recommends.) The hackage operators do not need and are not asking for any rights beyond those granted by the open source license you choose to use. All normal open source licenses grant enough rights to be able to operate this service. In particular, we expect as a consequence of the license that: 1. we have the right to distribute what you have uploaded to other people 2. we have the right to distribute certain derivatives and format conversions, including but not limited to: * documentation derived from the package * alternative presentations and formats of code (e.g. html markup) * excerpts and presentation of package metadata * modified versions of package metadata Please make sure that you comply with the license of all code and other material that you upload. For example, check that your tarball includes the license files of any 3rd party code that you include. We hope this will be uncontroversial as it is just the status quo. Note that the hackage admins are not getting involved in a license debate, and we are not asking for any grant of rights (implicitly or explicitly) when you upload stuff. The open source license you use grants all the rights we need to be able to run the site. Duncan On Sat, 2015-02-28 at 19:27 +0200, fr33domlover wrote:
Hello haskellers!
I would like to make a proposal regarding the license of software in Hackage.
One of the major parts of the Haskell community infrastructure in the package database server Hackage. As far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong - Hackage makes no restriction on the license of packages upload to it. But as a community working in cooperation to make good software, the Haskell community has embraced licenses like (L)GPL, MIT and BSD, which are free software licenses.
Actually the all-rights-reserved tag in Hackage [1] has only two packages tagged by it - the dummy no-op project HNop, and another package whose COPYING file contains a broken link and whose README says "BSD style license".
Software freedom is an ethical basis for collaboration on making software that's truly good and loayl to its users, and providing them control and freedom to access and use their computing resources.
It seems to me that the Haskell community is already enbracing this ethical basis, but Hackage doesn't provide any guarantees and it means that you'd have to check each package to be sure. By having that all-rights-reserved tag it also in a way welcomes software that doesn't go by these rules - however it seems that no packages do that even in the presence of the possibility.
I'd like to make a suggestion: have Hackage accept only packages released under free software licenses. This is probably true for most/all packages there, but making it official will both send a strong message to and from the community, and provide people with the security and peace of mind, knowing their software is free as in freedom.
It is also possible that companies use Haskell to create proprietary software using permissive-licensed libraries and tools from Hackage. I hope this isn't true, but even if it is, this software isn't offered by Hackage and I hope its existence doesn't affect the community's use of Hackage and free software.
Would you consider to embrace free software officially, including in Hackage?
Thanks for reading, waiting to hear from the community and from haskell.org maintainers, fr33domlover
[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/tag/all-rights-reserved
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