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

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2009, Tom Tobin wrote:

> 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.

The combination of haykll and pandoc clearly must be GPL. I don't think it 
automatically follows from that that hakyll taken alone must be GPL. One 
might argue that the hakyll itself must be a derivative work as it builds 
on pandoc, but equally there may well be at least some pieces of hakyll 
that have independent uses; in addition someone might write a 
API-compatible replacement for pandoc that was BSD3. I would therefore 
argue for clearly marking the hakyll source as BSD3, so long as there is 
some way to clearly signal that anything compiled from it will necessarily 
be GPL.

Ganesh