License in the Mac installer

[Isaac Dupree]

to be very precise, I think that the entire distribution is licensed 
under the intersection of BSD3-for-GHC and GPL-for-everything.  Now, 
this only affects what copyright notices need to stay included (any 
further restriction would obviously violate the GPL).


Also, as far as I can tell, as long as that GHC hasn't been modified in 
any legally significant way (human creative effort or something like 
that), a recipient can take that GHC and redistribute it under BSD3 (if 
they had the source code... but we're talking about binary distributions 
that rely on readline, so they don't actually have the source code this 
way) (although this means the distributor is obligated by the GPL to 
provide GHC's source code via the same channels... hmm).

now, if Readline were required for GHC, FSF might have issues with GHC 
not being GPL just the way it has issues with proprietary things using 
readline, because it's a derivative work, I dunno, this confuses me. 
(law /= programmers' sense)

Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
> Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
>> Roman Leshchinskiy:
>>>
>>> It would be possible to distribute GHC itself under BSD3 and readline 
>>> under the GPL if they were really distributed as two independent 
>>> thing (and, e.g., optionally linked together during installation). 
>>> But by prelinking them, you have created a combined work which must 
>>> be distributed under the GPL since it includes GPL'ed code.
>>
>> Yes, but what does that mean.  It means that GHC must fullfil all the 
>> obligations placed on us by the GPL.  Well we do that by distributing 
>> GHC under BSD3.
> 
> I don't think that's quite correct. If you distribute GHC+readline, you 
> can do that only under the GPL. You can still inform the user that the 
> GHC part is also available under BSD3 from haskell.org, but this 
> particular distribution has to be under the GPL. To be precise, the GPL 
> says:
> 
>   You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to
>   anyone who comes into possession of a copy.
> 
>   ...
> 
>   You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of
>   sections 4 and 5, provided that you also convey the machine-readable
>   Corresponding Source under the terms of this License
> 
> Note the "this license" part. Anyway, I don't think this is terribly 
> important. Personally, I'd just point the users to the source and 
> include the GPL in the package.
> 
> Roman
> 
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