[Haskell-cafe] blanket license for Haskell Platform?

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 25 October 2011 21:37, Eric Y. Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I'm combining Haskell software with some non-free/closed source work.
> I was wondering what sort of effort it would take to organise a blanket
> license for everything in the Haskell Platform, and whether it would be
> worthwhile to anybody.
>
> Here's my use case:
>
> - I am combining my Haskell [:-)] program with some non-free/closed
>  source [:-(] software
>
> - My user is concerned that a large number of having a large number of
>  individual licenses even though textually identical modulo author,
>  date, etc would mean a big hassle getting their lawyers and their
>  user's lawyers to sign off on each and every license

Why do their lawyers all need to sign off individually for BSD
licenses (which if memory serves all platform libraries have to be
licensed under, or some variant thereof)?  At most it just means they
need to lump them all into one big text file somewhere saying which
libraries they used... (then again, IANAL, and don't charge by the
hour to consider these complex technical questions :p).

> I feel a bit embarrassed asking this as it's already great and also
> very convenient that I can just grab this closed source stuff, but
> suppose we were to decide that putting together some sort of blanket
> license for the Haskell Platform would be a good idea.  How would we
> go about organising such an effort?

Well, it would need copyright attribution/agreement of everyone that's
ever committed code to any library/application to the Platform (which
is why so many large projects want it) to re-license them AFAIK, which
may be difficult.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com