Russ Allbery wrote:
Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> writes:Many Perl modules are just licensed "under the same terms as Perl itself", so as soon as Perl is released under this license, we will have several hundreds of packages automagically under it.Of course, this will require updating/changing many of them (as Perl6 is not backwards-compatible)... But I do see a case for including this license in common-licenses.Right, this is really a question of Perl 6.
Perl 6 is already distributed under version 2.0, currently included in the Parrot package. As are over a hundred Perl 6 modules, currently included in the Pugs package. We haven't split them out into separate Debian packages yet, but will in the next 6 months or so.
If you want me to wait 6 months and ask again, I can. It just made more sense to me to ask before we create a hundred or so 'copyright' files for a hundred or so packages.
Perl 5 can never legally be released under this license so far as I can see. The Perl maintainers didn't do copyright assignment, so relicensing the existing Perl code base would require contacting every contributor and obtaining their permission to relicense their code. This isn't really feasible.
Version 2.0 of the license was intentionally drafted so it's entirely compatible with version 1.0 of the license. It has the same terms, only cleaner and more legally precise. It's a drop-in replacement, and copyright assignments aren't necessary.
Allison