cvs commit: fptools/libraries/base LICENSE

[Ross Paterson]

I was wrong about the HTML and Parsec licences being the same.  But still ...

On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 04:45:52PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Perhaps, but IANAL and I figured that concatenating the licenses was
> most likely to be correct.  The idea is that libraries/base should be
> BSD-licensed, but I'm not sure what to do about the copyrights.  The BSD
> license requires the copyrights to be reproduced in a binary
> distribution, so shouldn't all the copyrights be collected in one place?

I don't think it scales.  Already LICENSE omits some copyright holders,
and you expect many more in the future.  But you don't need the copyrights
there, because they're already in the source files.  To comply with the
BSD licence, it suffices to have Haddock output the copyright line for
the module plus a hyperlink to the licence.

However it's not quite clear what licence a particular module is under,
though they're all similar.  What's the licence on Data.FiniteMap?
The header says

	BSD-style (see the file libraries/base/LICENSE)

but that file contains several BSD-style licences.  You have to know that
it came from GHC and is thus under the GHC licence.  The ambiguity could
be removed by naming a licence.  Removing the copyrights from LICENSE
makes it easier to share licences, keeping their number down.

You could even have a directory of licence files, which would also handle
other libraries that use other licences.