[Haskell-cafe] GPL License of H-Matrix and prelude numeric

[Antoine Latter]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 1:27 AM, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 23:03 -0800, John Millikin wrote:
>> It's not possible for a .cabal file to specify which license the final
>> binaries will use -- it depends on what libraries are locally
>> installed, what flags the build uses, and what the executables
>> themselves link.
>
> It's certainly possible for library authors to indicate in their Cabal
> files the licensing restrictions that use of the library will place on
> the end result.  The library author knows about all of this stuff.
> Sure, it may not be a perfect system -- but in practice, flags should
> probably not change licensing anyway, and there will nearly always be
> some license that is the most restrictive of all that apply and so can
> be said to govern the end result by itself.
>
> Of course the final executable would need to collect the licensing
> restrictions of all of its dependencies.  But it then would not need to
> recursively check their dependencies, and so on.
>

I state the license of what is being distributed - and what is being
distributed is the source code as I wrote it. For me it is
conceptually the easiest to understand, as I don't know in what
environment the code will be compiled.

Taken to an extreme, I don't want to have to list my library as GPL
because it will be linked against the stock GHC runtime by almost all
of its users.

I also don't want my package description to be wrong when my
transitive dependencies change - either by re-licensing or by their
adding new dependencies.

Antoine