[Haskell-cafe] blanket license for Haskell Platform?

Alan Jeffrey ajeffrey at bell-labs.com
Tue Oct 25 16:10:01 CEST 2011


One possible solution (which would avoid a blanket license) would be to 
have a tool generate SPDX (http://spdx.org/ and 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/spdx) metadata 
from cabal metadata. SPDX (software package data exchange) is a format 
for machine-readable descriptions of software licensing, developed by 
the Linux Foundation.

SPDX is intended to solve exactly the problem you're having: providing a 
summary of all of the licenses required for using a large heterogeneous 
collection of software with sprawling dependencies.

A.

On 10/25/2011 05:37 AM, Eric Y. Kow wrote:
> So I'm combining Haskell software with some non-free/closed source work.
> I was wondering what sort of effort it would take to organise a blanket
> license for everything in the Haskell Platform, and whether it would be
> worthwhile to anybody.
>
> Here's my use case:
>
> - I am combining my Haskell [:-)] program with some non-free/closed
>    source [:-(] software
>
> - My user is concerned that a large number of having a large number of
>    individual licenses even though textually identical modulo author,
>    date, etc would mean a big hassle getting their lawyers and their
>    user's lawyers to sign off on each and every license
>
> I feel a bit embarrassed asking this as it's already great and also
> very convenient that I can just grab this closed source stuff, but
> suppose we were to decide that putting together some sort of blanket
> license for the Haskell Platform would be a good idea.  How would we
> go about organising such an effort?
>
> I wonder if this is a sort of thing we could tie to the IHG...
>
> Thanks,
>



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