[Haskell-cafe] Hackage and Free Software

[Marcin Mrotek]

Hello,

Hackage accepts source packages only anyway. Why would anyone upload
propertiary code and risk it being stolen? Noone uploads non-free
software to Hackage, it's safe to assume noone will ever do (except
perhaps as an act of trolling, and such packages could be just flat
out removed), so why fix it when it isn't broken? Also, as it was
already pointed out by Mike Meyer, a list of pre-approved licenses
doesn't solve the problem of compatibility and permission to actually
build and distribute binaries at all, and it would be better solved by
providing some tools to view and check licenses of the transitive
closure of dependencies of a package (which would, incidentally, make
it easy to weed out non-free packages too, for anyone who desires so)

Best regards,
Marcin Mrotek