[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: hakyll-0.1

[Tom Tobin]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Ben Franksen <ben.franksen at online.de> wrote:
> Ketil Malde wrote:
>> Your contributions could still be licensed under a different license
>> (e.g. BSD), as long as the licensing doesn't prevent somebody else to
>> pick it up and relicense it under GPL.
>>
>> At least, that's how I understand things.
>
> Right. So hakyll is absolutely fine with a BSD3 license, AFAICS.

Seriously, no, this is *totally* wrong reading of the GPL, probably
fostered by a misunderstanding of the term "GPL-compatible license".
GPL-compatible means the compatibly-licensed work can be incorporated
into the GPL'd work (the whole of which is GPL'd), *not the other way
around*.  If you are forming a derivative work based on the GPL'd
work, and thus you have to release that derivative work under the GPL.

If you don't believe me, ask the people at the Software Freedom Law Center:

help at softwarefreedom.org

They've answered legal questions for me before.

Please note that I'm not raising this issue because I like the GPL (I
don't); I'm raising it because I don't think many people understand
the consequences of using a GPL'd library.  I think there would be
more pressure on library authors to not GPL their works if everyone
understood how restrictive the GPL was.