every use of BSD4 on hackage is incorrect

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-03-01 at 10:39 +0100, Felix Martini wrote:
> Right now i cannot see a reason why the cabal license field is an
> enumeration instead of a string. The purpose seems to be to direct
> people to preferred licenses of the Haskell community. If so this is
> the wrong approach imo.

It's not clear that that is the intention. This has been in the spec and
the design since the very beginning. You'd have to ask someone who
helped with the original spec to be sure of the intention.

http://haskell.org/cabal/release/old/users-guide-0.1/x29.html#pkg-descr
http://haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-1.0/doc/pkg-spec-html/

It has always allowed for using any license. I suspect the intention was
for convenience and to provide some consistency for common licenses, eg
so we don't get packages specifying "gpl", "gpl2" "gpl-2" "GPL" and we
have to wonder if those are all the same. In the common case it gives
machine recognisable information.

Duncan