[Haskell-cafe] Cabal licence files

Dougal Stanton ithika at gmail.com
Thu Dec 14 22:14:32 EST 2006


The cabal setup recognises a small set of licences which I don't think 
are well explained. I'm trying to put together a canonical list for 
setting up new projects.

GPL: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt>
LGPL: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt>
Thankfully the FSF are particularly anal^W well-organised about this 
kind of thing and they make it very easy to determine what each licence 
is and how to apply it

BSD3/BSD4:
There appears to be one explicitly-named BSD licence on the OSI site. 
There is also a closely related MIT licence. I don't know which would be 
which, if these are the two referred to in the licence data type.

<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php>
<http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html>

PublicDomain:
The Creative Commons people have a public domain licence, though I am 
uncertain whether it is intended for code. Maybe this doesn't matter 
when what you're saying is "I give up all rights"?

<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>

AllRightsReserved:
This is the very opposite of a PD licence and, I believe, the default 
licence when there is no other explicitly stated. However it would be 
nice to say as much rather than relying on people's legal knowledge. ;)

OtherLicense:
This one's easy enough...

If anyone can fill in gaps and correct the errors in the above I think 
it would be useful. Obviously if this has been discussed elsewhere just 
point me off in the right direction! :)

Cheers,

D.


More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list