every use of BSD4 on hackage is incorrect

Bjorn Bringert bjorn at bringert.net
Sat Mar 1 17:05:10 EST 2008


On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 11:11 PM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> The following hackage packages specify in their .cabal file:
>
>  license: BSD4
>
>  Which is the 4-clause BSD license, ie the one with the advertising
>  clause.
>
>  cabal-upload-0.3
>  Chart-0.5
>  FiniteMap-0.1
>  haxr-3000.0.1
>  haxr-th-1.0
>  hbeat-0.1
>  htar-0.1
>  pcap-0.4.2
>  tar-0.1.1.1
>  unix-compat-0.1.2.1
>
>  Inspecting the LICENSE files for every one of these packages reveals
>  that they actually use the 3-clause BSD license. Not a single hackage
>  package really uses the 4-clause BSD license. In every case that it has
>  been used it was just a confusion.
>
>  We therefore propose to deprecate BSD4 as a valid license in .cabal
>  files:
>  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/205
>
>  In the unlikely case that anyone really wants to use the 4-clause BSD
>  license they can still specify "license: OtherLicense" and put the text
>  in the accompanying LICENSE file.
>
>
>  Additionally, I propose to add the MIT license since there are a couple
>  packages that really use that and allow optional versions on the
>  licenses that are versioned, which includes the GPL and LGPL.
>
>  Looking at OtherLicense we find common ones are MIT, variations on BSD3
>  (2 clause and fewer, other informal variations), disjunctions of BSD3 /
>  GPL (ie dual licensing), conjunctions of BSD3 / GPL (ie some bits user
>  BSD some under GPL).

Hi Duncan,

thanks for pointing that out. I've fixed the 6 out of those 10 that
are mine. I must have gotten that wrong some time long ago and then
just copied the .cabal file to new projects. Consider this a vote for
deprecating BSD4.

/Bjorn


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