The problem with "same terms as Perl" licensing

Shlomi Fish brought up an angle to the problem with slapping a boilerplate "same terms as Perl itself" at the bottom of your modules when you distribute them: Which version of Perl do you mean?

For me, I've used that line out of laziness, because I didn't care to think too much about specifics of the details. Now I'll be going back and specifying in my modules.

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By Andy Lester on April 10, 2008 1:09 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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2 Comments

Randy J. Ray Author Profile Page said:
I've recently been updating the license info on my modules as I prepare any new releases. It was inspired by someone from the Fedora Core project wanting to include RPC::XML but the old license verbage wasn't compatible with them (that was solved by me sending a message giving them explicit permission to release under LGPL). Now, I explicitly state that license/distribution is under both Artistic 2.0 and LGPL 2.1, and I provide links to both licenses in the POD of every module. Overkill, maybe, but effective.
April 10, 2008 4:23 PM
ysth Author Profile Page said:

Note that, contrary to Shlomi's article, (most of) Perl 5 is GPL version 1 licensed, not version 2. This in and of itself may be enough to prompt some to be more specific.

But I'd rather see a campaign to get modules to state some license (and a bug-reporting mechanism, to boot); far too many do not.

April 14, 2008 3:26 AM

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This page contains a single entry by Andy Lester published on April 10, 2008 1:09 PM.

Open source is not piracy was the previous entry in this blog.

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