Re: Perl module licenses (was Re: libxml-filter-sax1tosax2-perl_0.03-1_i386.changes REJECTED)
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org) wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 07:56:37PM +0000, James Troup wrote:
> > Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> > > in context it's already clear and exactly what they want to say.
> >
> > I think you're being generous in claiming that it's exactly they want
> > to say: as you pointed out it's extraordinarily common and I think a
> > large number of modules authors will do it because "that's what
> > everyone else does" (much in the same way that a fair amount of code
> > ends up under the GPL despite the author not really understanding what
> > that means).
> >
> > I don't think it's at all clear (what's "perl" in context of the
> > license? what happens if perl (the real thing) is released under a
> > new license?) and we wouldn't accept such an equivocal license in any
> > other context, so I don't see why we should special-case perl modules.
>
> I've always thought it amounts to delegating licensing to the perl
> maintainers, and that it's actually desired that a changed perl licence
> should apply (perl6 will be under GPL / Clarified Artistic Licence,
> AIUI). Still, I can see there's clear room for contention and ambiguity.
>
> Somebody with a firm grasp of the legalities and exactly why that kind
> of delegated licensing is a bad idea should probably put together a mail
> to, um, somewhere like module-authors@perl.org or maybe even
> perl5-porters@perl.org (since e.g. perlmodlib(1) and pod2man(1)
> explicitly suggest the "Perl itself" style, saying things like "This
> makes it easy for people to use your module with Perl"). Contacting
> upstream authors one by one isn't likely to be terribly useful without
> getting general agreement from the Perl community that the idiom should
> be changed.
>
> > > If referring to /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright isn't kosher then I
> > > think we should just copy the licensing fragment from that file into
> > > the copyright files that need it.
> >
> > That would at least give us less grounds on which to reject packages
> > like this, but, personally, I do think there's a problem with this
> > kind of "license" and (day-dreamingly) wish people weren't quite so
> > keen to ostrich about it just because it affects a large number of
> > packages :(
>
> Those certainly aren't my grounds for thinking it isn't a problem, but
> my legal knowledge is weak, so I'll defer ...
Ok, but what do we do in the meantime. I've got a couple of new Perl
packages I would like to upload (e.g. the new version of XML::LibXML
needs XML::LibXML::Common). If they are rejected because of this
license issue I'm basically stuck.
Thanks,
Ardo
--
Ardo van Rangelrooij
home email: ardo@debian.org
home page: http://people.debian.org/~ardo
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