[Haskell-cafe] Hackage suggestion: Gather the list of the licenses of all dependencies of a package

[Malcolm Wallace]

On 13 Dec 2012, at 18:40, Michael Snoyman wrote:

> I'm not quite certain what to make of:
> 
> If you have a commercial use for cpphs, and feel the terms of the (L)GPL
> are too onerous, you have the option of distributing unmodified binaries
> (only, not sources) under the terms of a different licence (see
> LICENCE-commercial).
> 
> It seems like that's saying "if you really want to, use the BSD license instead." But I'm not sure what the legal meaning of "If you have a commercial use" is. Malcolm: could you clarify what the meaning is?

No, the LICENCE-commercial is not BSD.  Read it more carefully. :-)

So, I dual-licensed cpphs (which was originally only LGPL as a library, GPL as a binary), in response to a request from a developer (working for a company) who wished to use it as a library linked into their own software (rather than a standalone executable), but who was unable to convince his boss that LGPL would be acceptable.  IIRC, the software was going to end up in some gadget to be sold (and therefore the code was being distributed, indirectly).  The commercial licence I provided for him was intended to uphold the spirit of the LGPL, without going as far as BSD in laxity.  So, if you simply want to use cpphs in a distributed product (but not modify it), it is very easy.  The moment you want to distribute a modified version, you must abide by the LGPL, which to me essentially means that you contribute back your changes to the community.

Regards,
    Malcolm