Licenses

[Duncan Coutts]

On 20 December 2010 02:14, Mark Lentczner <markl at glyphic.com> wrote:
> I took a look at the licenses for the included projects.
>
> They are all, but one, BSD3-like, though there are several minor variants of the actual license text.
>
> The exception is syb which is part BSD3, and two parts which are based on the Haskell 98 report license.
>
> The installer has the ability to show a license notice to the user and ask them to agree to it. The notice presented by the GHC installer concatenates the GHC BSD3-like license and the LGPL license for GMP into one long page.

Technically there is no need to ask users to agree to anything. If you
just want to make users aware that it is open source then that's fine
of course.

> I propose instead to show a much shorter page, something like:
>
>        "The components in this package are governed by several open source licenses:
>
>          GHC system: BSD3
>          GMP library: LGPL
>          Haskell Platform Libraries: BSD3 & Haskell Report 98
>
>        Details can be found on the web at the [Haskell Platform site].
>        The components are each installed with their respective license files."

That seems fine. Since we don't need them to read any licenses or
agree to anything then it's good to keep it simple and short. Users
can go find more details if they want.

> A third option is to not have the installer show the licenses, nor ask for a formal "I Agree" step, and instead, simply point out the licenses in the README presented at install time, and in the installed "Start" HTML doc.

That would also be perfectly reasonable.

> Thoughts? What do the other installers for Haskell Platform do?

I can't remember what the windows one does, but the linux distro
packages of course do not display any text at install time. They do
all include the license as part of the installed files, and perhaps a
README.

Duncan