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The Module's Licensing (Score:2)
I hope I'm not starting a licensing flamewar here, but your licence section reads:
Now, the same terms as Perl (?) itself, if we assume that Perl == perl 5, would mean a dual-GPLv2-and-above and Artistic 1.0 *only*. Now, the Artistic 1.0 licence is very vague and is considered neither GPL-compatible nor free by the Free Software Foundation [fsf.org]. And the GPL is well, the GPL [gnu.org] and has its own res
Re: (Score:2)
Do you realize this is the standard way of licensing Perl modules? What in the world made you single out this one module and this one author for this subject?
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
Re:The Module's Licensing (Score:2)
Do you realize this is the standard way of licensing Perl modules? What in the world made you single out this one module and this one author for this subject?
I didn't single out Aristotle or his module in particular, nor accused him of doing anything wrong in particular. I just noted that in his general request-for-comments for the module because I noticed it there. (Better late than never, I guess).
I just wanted to note that from now on, it would be a better idea from the legal standpoint to use a different wording of the licensing terms as I explained above to avoid the licensing problems that the "same as perl5" face.
But thanks for noting that - I'll convert and extend my comments into a blog post on my use.perl.org journal for future consideration. Expect a flamewar about it on an RSS aggregator near you. ;-)
That put aside, an alternative to this, which I'm using, is to use licences that permit relicensing of derived works, to other free (or non-free) licences. The MIT X11 licence explicitly allows "sub-licensing" and is my preferred licence for Perl and non-Perl open-source work. Some of the modules I maintain on CPAN still carry different licensing terms (usually "same as perl") because I inherited them from different authors. In that case, I normally disclaim all rights to the module, so all the remaining copyright holders of the code can make re-licensing decisions without me.
Thanks again.
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