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

[Ben Franksen]

Tom Tobin wrote:

> 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.

Yes, very much.

(and IANAL, too, of course).

Cheers
Ben