perl modules' default licence

[Nicholas Clark <nick@ccl4.org>]

I sometimes read in Debian Weekly News about discussions on debian-legal
about problems with packaging perl modules for Debian because of the
vagueness of the licensing terms they use. My understanding is that the
phrase that causes problems is:

  This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the same terms as Perl itself.

It's generated by the default tool supplied by perl to make skeleton modules
(a perl script named h2xs), and I suspect that it's been adopted by other
tools used to make perl modules.

Could debian-legal suggest a better phrasing for that default licence line
that solves the issues you have with it?

Debian seems to be the most careful group when it comes to precise
ramifications of licensing terms, so I would hope that any terms that pass
muster here would be uncontroversial everywhere else. I realise that this is
rather late, in that 5.8.1 is due out very soon, but as this is effectively
a documentation patch it is likely that I can convince Jarkko to put it
in. It wouldn't solve the issues with existing modules' licences, but would
eliminate the problem for any new modules. I'd expect that it would be a
strong influence on other module building tools, and I'd hope that it would
facilitate getting existing module authors to patch their modules to a
DFSG-compliant state.

Nicholas Clark