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

[Tom Tobin]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Robert Greayer <robgreayer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Tom Tobin <korpios at korpios.com> 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 crux here is that the source code of hakyll, released on hackage, is not
> a derivative of Pandoc (it contains, as far as I understand it, no Pandoc
> source code).  A compiled executable *is* a derivative of Pandoc, so anyone
> who *distributes* a compiled executable would need to make *all* the source
> available under the GPL (including the hakyll source).  Since the hakyll
> package is released under BSD3, this would be allowed (AIUI, IANAL).

IANAL either, but my understanding is that judges take a very dim view
of attempts like this to evade the requirements of a license.  If a
piece of software is built on another piece of software, it doesn't
matter if you're looking at source code or a binary.

I can write the SFLC and pose a hypothetical situation that captures
the gist of what we're talking about, and post the response here, if
anyone is interested.