Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage and Free Software

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 3:36 PM, fr33domlover wrote:

On 2015-02-28 Mike Meyer wrote:

...

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.

Until you've got an objective set of ethics - or a definition of "software freedom" - that everyone accepts, that's just a long-winded way of saying "arbitrary". 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.

Not quite. "OtherLicense" is an accepted license tag, and I take it to mean I can use any license I want. If you're going to place a restriction on the license types beyond "use one of our tags" (and if you disallow the otherLicense tag, then I'd say that's an arbitrary restriction), then you should either define the terms in it, or choose terms that are well defined. "free software" is so ill defined that gnu.org has to explain what they mean by "free software" (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). They even point out that there are open source software licenses that don't meet their definition of free ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html). Their definition of proprietary as "not free" makes software licensed under such licenses proprietary, though that's certainly not common usage. So just saying "only free software licenses" or "no proprietary software" would make matters worse, not better, because those terms have multiple meanings in common use. And that makes them not only arbitrary, but vague.