[Haskell-cafe] Hackage and Free Software

[Francesco Ariis]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2015 at 04:58:10PM +0100, Marcin Mrotek wrote:
> 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?

As Gershom B's messages states, as now AllRightsReserved would be
rejected on hackage. I agree with you nothing is broken with this
behaviour and I am not trying to 'fix' it in any way!

> 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)

This is not about solving the dependencies problem (kudos to the person
coming up with such a package), it's about asking the developer, if s/he
doesn't pick a licence known by cabal, to please choose some recognised
open-source licence.

It seems to me a sensible and straightforward documentation of what is
already happening on hackage and I fail to see how this can look
controversial.