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

[Maciej Piechotka]

On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 22:01 -0800, John Millikin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 21:51, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-01-25 at 21:41 -0800, John Millikin wrote:
> >> Licensing is a property of the code, not the package; Cabal's
> >> licensing field is only a useful shorthand for "most of the code here
> >> is covered by...".
> >
> > That would be a very dangerous position to take.  When the Cabal license
> > field informs someone that something is licensed under the BSD, I think
> > any reasonable person would assume that means ALL of the code is
> > licensed under the BSD, and without added restrictions.  We're being
> > extremely unhelpful if developers have to read through every source file
> > in every library they use, and all of its indirect dependencies, to make
> > sure there's not an additional restriction in there somewhere.
> 
> I don't think a reasonable person would assume that. Based on the
> almost universal habit of noting the license in source file comment
> headers, a reasonable programmer would know to check the status of any
> code he wants to copy into his own works.
> 
> For example, if I copy some BSD3 code into one of my GPL'd libraries,
> that code remains BSD3 (and owned by the original author). The Cabal
> field will still say GPL, because most of the code is GPL, but some of
> it is not.
> 
> Alternatively, I could bundle a GPL'd test script with BSD3 code. The
> code itself (and hence Cabal file) is BSD3, but not everything in the
> archive is.
> 
> The package's dependencies are irrelevant, unless the package's code
> was itself copied from one of its deps.

Most reasonable people have limited time to read through the source code
and some of it does not include the header.

I think it is reasonable that the License include most compatible
("restrictive") license of library i.e. if one is using GPL-2+, GPL-3+
and BSD-3 in single project it should include GPL-3+ even if most of it
is covered by BSD-3. 

There is smaller problem with program as hardly anyone links with
program.

Regards
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