[Haskell-cafe] Dual-licensing the package on Hackage

[David Sorokin]

Thanks Thu,

I agree with you. Just I don't know what to write in the license field of the .cabal file: GPL or OtherLicense. The both choices seem correct to me and misleading at the same time.

Cheers,
David

30.07.2013, в 12:53, Vo Minh Thu написал(а):

> 2013/7/30 David Sorokin <david.sorokin at gmail.com>:
>> Hi, Cafe!
>> 
>> Probably, it was asked before but I could not find an answer with help of Google.
>> 
>> I have a library which is hosted on Hackage. The library is licensed under BSD3. It is a very specialized library for a small target group. Now I'm going to relicense it and release a new version already under the dual-license: GPLv3 and commercial. In most cases GPL will be sufficient as this is not a library in common sense.
>> 
>> Can I specify the GPL license in the .cabal file, or should I write OtherLicense?
>> 
>> I'm going to add the information about dual-licensing in the description section of the .cabal file, though.
> 
> Although you can indeed license your software under different
> licences, in the case of your question it doesn't seem to be a concern
> with Hackage:
> 
> The license displayed on Hackage is the one for the corresponding
> .cabal file (or at least I think it is). So you issue your new version
> with the changed license, the new version is available with the new
> license, the old versions are still available with the old license.
> Everything is fine.
> 
> Now about the dual licensing. It seems it is again not a problem with
> Hackage: you are not granting through Hackage such a commercial
> license. I guess you provide it upon request (for some money). I.e.
> when I download your library from Hackage, I receive it under the
> terms of the BSD (or GPL) license you have chosen, not under a
> commercial license that I would have to receive through other means.
> 
> Otherwise the semantic of the license field on Hackage would mean the
> library is available under such and such licenses, which are not
> granted to you when you download the library on Hackage. Only when you
> download the package you can actually find the licensing terms (e.g.
> in the LICENSE file). But this seems unlikely to me.
> 
> Cheers,
> Thu