Licensing requirements and copyright notices

I'm not sure where or how to bring this up, but I figured I would inform you that complying with the licensing requirements to distribute executables programmed in Haskell (using GHC) seems to be tiresome.

I have a personal project written in Haskell and Lua, and I recently tried to make sure that I comply with the necessary requirements to distribute it. My result was a 1660-line copyright file (http://www.houeland.com/kol/docs/copyright), which I believe is excessive.

This mostly stems from the use of BSD-style licenses for libraries, which require copyright notices to be reproduced for redistributions in binary form.

Many of them are based on code from the GHC project + the Haskell 98 Report + the Haskell Foreign Function Interface specification. I think it would be nice if at least those parts could clearly be distributed using only one reproduction of the GHC license (including allowing derived binary forms to not include the restrictions against claiming to be definitions of the Haskell 98 Language / Foreign Function Interface). Currently the GHC-based libraries have licenses that say they're derived from GHC and include the GHC license notice. The libraries are listed as BSD3 in cabal files, but it's not clear to me that the statement actually covers licensing for the entirety of the library (developments after the split), and whether all GHC-based libraries can currently be distributed using a single copyright notice.

Generally, many of the other available Haskell libraries also seem to use BSD-style licenses, which can be a hassle to comply with for binary redistributions, mostly when dependencies also use separate BSD-style licenses that must be included. Having a 'default' license in the Haskell community that's similar to Boost or zlib instead of BSD3 might be preferable for the many smaller libraries available. Many of the libraries actually have different licenses (but similar ones such as MIT, or people modifying parts of their license file) while being listed as BSD3 in cabal files.

I don't know exactly what you can do about this, but an easier licensing landscape for binary redistributions would certainly be nice. (And possibly tools for automatically listing licensing restrictions and producing copyright notices accurately.)

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