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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • In asserting a license you are asserting permission from the copyright holders. But you don't know whether you have that permission. And if you don't, then you are putting people in potential violation of the rights of people who are copyright holders.

    In particular I happen to know that Tom Christiansen has been consistently vocal in his dislike of all things FSF, including the GPL. He takes extreme objection to the viral nature of the GPL, and even stronger objection to then calling the result "free".
    • I agree that discussing it with Tom would have been the polite thing to do, but I don't think it's a legal requirement.

      I could understand the concern if the original were GPL'd - a key point of the GPL is that it doesn't allow relicensing.

      But, the Artistic license allows one to "place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise make them Freely Available" (Conditions 3.a), where Freely Available is defined in part as meaning "... that no fee is charged for the item itself, though there may be fees
      • Unfortunately the Artistic License is not compatible with the GPL. The Artistic License says in item 5 that, You may not charge a fee for this Package itself. This is not compatible with the GPL because the GPL allows that. Similarly if you look at item 3 of the Artistic License you'll find that with the Artistic License you are not allowed to make a modification and distribute it to a third party without making your modification public. The GPL allows that.

        Consult with a lawyer. But by my reading if s
        • Well, frankly, I can't imagine Tom making a stink over this. The clear distinction between the GPL and BSD-style licenses like the Artistic is the right to relicense vs. the lack of it. Pretty much by definition, the right to relicense includes licenses that the original author dislikes. That's the whole point of the BSD-style position, that someone who reuses the code should be able to choose their own license.

          It's like free speech in a way; it means that we all hear things said that we don't like or agree with. But we can't prevent that without abandoning the principle we claim to believe in.

          At any rate, I think this is all a tempest in a teapot. Despite the hair-splitting over license terms, it's still being distributed on CPAN mirrors around the world, just like Tom's original. It's as free in practical everyday usage as it's always been.
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