[Haskell-cafe] Hackage and Free Software

[fr33domlover]

On 2015-02-28
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

> 
> There are open source projects that are systematically excising GPL'ed
> software because of the problems it shares with ShareAlike licenses. Should
> we disallow the GPL because some people have problems with it?
> 
> Making Hackage better to help users sort out which licenses they are
> willing to accept in their project - which I personally would like to do on
> a project-by-project basis! - is a solution to these problems. Restricting
> the licenses that are acceptable on Hackage to meet some arbitrary set of
> criteria is a knee-jerk.

The restrictions aren't arbitrary at all. They're based on ethics. On Software
freedom. But sure, a package with invalid license tagging should instantly
become unavailable.

Here's a suggestion: We can talk about this forever, because there seem to be
no official guidelines to really discuss. Why don't we put clear guidelines at
hackage.haskell.org ? If these guidelines would be "proprietary software
allowed", then there's a point to discuss. But if the guideline requires
certain tagging - currently all the license tags except all-rights-reserved are
free software licenses - maybe the problem is already solved.

Who maintains the community hackage instance and the guidelines? Just to
make sure these people are aware of this discussion.


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