Before taking any action with respect to cabal or hackage, etc., I'd think people would want to see their explicit response.
On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:34 PM, Tom Tobin <[email protected]> wrote: > After politely pestering them again, I finally heard back from the > Software Freedom Law Center regarding our GPL questions (quoted > below). > > I exchanged several emails to clarify the particular issues; in short, > the answers are "No", "No", "N/A", and "N/A". The SFLC holds that a > library that depends on a GPL'd library must in turn be GPL'd, even if > the library is only distributed as source and not in binary form. > They offered to draft some sort of explicit response if we'd find it > useful. > > Maybe it would be useful if Cabal had some sort of licensing check > command that could be run on a .cabal file, and warn an author if any > libraries it depends on (directly or indirectly) are GPL'd but the > .cabal itself does not have the license set to GPL. > > > On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:21 PM, Tom Tobin <[email protected]> wrote: >> I'd like to get these questions out to the SFLC so we can satisfy our >> curiosity; at the moment, here's what I'd be asking: >> >> Background: X is a library distributed under the terms of the GPL. Y >> is another library which calls external functions in the API of X, and >> requires X to compile. X and Y have different authors. >> >> 1) Can the author of Y legally distribute the *source* of Y under a >> non-GPL license, such as the 3-clause BSD license or the MIT license? >> >> 2) If the answer to 1 is "no", is there *any* circumstance under which >> the author of Y can distribute the source of Y under a non-GPL >> license? >> >> 3) If the answer to 1 is "yes", what specifically would trigger the >> redistribution of a work in this scenario under the GPL? Is it the >> distribution of X+Y *together* (whether in source or binary form)? >> >> 4) If the answer to 1 is "yes", does this mean that a "BSD-licensed" >> library does not necessarily mean that closed-source software can be >> distributed which is based upon such a library (if it so happens that >> the library in turn depends on a copylefted library)? >> >> By the way, apologies to the author of Hakyll — I'm sure this isn't >> what you had in mind when you announced your library! I'm just hoping >> that we can figure out what our obligations are based upon the GPL, >> since I'm not so sure myself anymore. >> > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
