Licensing of Haskell code

[Mark Carroll]

I should mention to contributors to the Haskell community that the precise
licensing of their code can matter a lot.

With my commercial company hat on, we tend to have to avoid using Haskell
stuff that is GPL'd, and I worry generally about proliferation of such
code impeding efforts to have Haskell take off in industry. BSD-style
licenses are a lot easier because they don't "infect" other code from the
same application, which may even be from other commercial partners, etc.
(The LGPL is probably better in this respect, too.)

With my altruistic idealist hat on, I am glad that the GPL impacts the
commercial software industry, I think it was generally a good idea, and
maybe it's for the greater good even it disadvantages some companies. And,
if a company doesn't like that something's GPL'd, they can track down the
authors and negotiate to be licensed the code on some other basis.

My point is not to tell people how they should license their code,
although I'd be happy to discuss that over on haskell-cafe. I hope I can
avoid opening too large a can of worms here. My points are more that:

It matters which particular "opensource" licence you pick, so review them
and choose carefully, based on your beliefs and ideals.

It would be really great if it were somehow easy for Haskell developers to
be easily able to check the licensing status of various bits of code -
tools, libraries, etc. - that their software uses, or that they are
thinking of having it use. It's not too hard to look into now, but after
the Haskell community and hierarchical libraries have grown much more I
don't know if one might wish that something had been built in early on
that somehow eases semi-automated checking.

-- Mark