An issue was recently raised against the LICENSE file in a project I created using stack new (stack version 2.13.1).
Essentially the raiser was querying why the LICENSE differed from the BSD-3-Clause license. It does seem strange, especially the use of the verbiage “All rights reserved.” which does not appear in the BSD-3-Clause license. Does anyone know why the generated LICENSE file is the way it is?
“All rights reserved” is a phrase that originated in copyright law as part of copyright notices. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right. Copyright law in most countries no longer requires such notices, but the phrase persists.
So it doesn’t really mean anything other than “the creator of the project/package/library can do whatever they want with the thing, because they made it”. And I guess, given it’s on a very permissive license, the addition doesn’t do much, because everyone can do pretty much whatever they want with the project/package/library.
That’s true, but these (pointless?) modifications mean that the LICENSE isn’t auto-detected e.g. by github.com. See the auto-detection result below for the project in question after switching to the BSD-3-Clause license.
Looking though the Stack sources revealed nothing pertinent. But stack relies on Cabal-the-library, and a quick search through the Cabal sources lists:
Nice find. Based on the git blame of that file, the copyright text in that file has been unchanged for 15 years. There may have been updates to the license in that time. The commit references http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php as its inspiration, which now redirects to the BSD-2-Clause license anyway. @Underlap, you could consider opening a PR against Cabal with updated text!