Re: Copyright License Proposal

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> wrote:

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.

My head is a bit swimming here, but if you are saying that using Module::Install as a packaging tool impedes on the licensing of the module it packages then this is a bug that needs to be dealt with outright. It is certainly not the intent of Module::Install to impose this.

In any case, can we not automate anything that a human would create by hand, as long as the person with the right to automate understands what they are doing, and asserts that it is correct?

Hope that helps,

- Jonas

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

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