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Re: Copyright License Proposal



On 11-06-06 at 08:34pm, Ingy dot Net wrote:
> I just counted that I have 416 modules (not dists) on CPAN. They all 
> have (or should have) a pod section like this:
> 
> =head1 AUTHOR
> 
> Ingy döt Net <ingy@ingy.net>
> 
> =head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
> 
> Copyright (c) 2011. Ingy döt Net.
> 
> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify 
> it under the same terms as Perl itself.
> 
> See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html
> 
> That's all I do. This is standard, and typical. Tools turn this into 
> 'license: perl' in META.*
> 
> Copyright and license are seen as basically the same thing. Whatever I 
> decide to put into my debian/copyright files, it will be the same (or 
> some common permutation) for all of them, no?
> 
> If we can detect that a module has nothing more than that, then we can 
> fully automate for those modules, no?

If "we" are CPAN authors wanting to distribute via CPAN, then you might 
be right.

But no, copyright and licensing is *not* the same.  Licensing makes it 
possible to reuse and extend works of others - as you do when you 
include pieces of Module::Install inside your Acme module.

True, both Acme and Module::Install has same licensing but not true that 
you are the sole author of the Acme project as shipped in the tarballs!

So "we" being Debian cannot fully automate redistribution of your 
project the way you currently document our permission to do so, because 
you do not explicitly and machine-readable state who gave Debian the 
permission to redistribute inc/* under the same license as Perl.


Hope that helps,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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