Re: Automake: use of modified Perl modules & GPL

[Russ Allbery]

Elaine -HFB- Ashton <address@hidden> writes:

> Personally, I don't care if people use the GPL, AL, BSD or make up their
> own and call it the 'rooty tooty fresh and fruity' license which
> requires the user to eat at Denny's while using the module as long as it
> is an appropriate use of the mirror, i.e. it is open source and it is
> not demo or commercial-ware, etc.

I think that we're all agreed on this point.

> Were we to get into the business of requiring licenses we would also
> have to do the task of checking for and possibly removing items that are
> of potential legal liability.

You seem to be under the impression that not requiring license statements
somehow reduces your legal liability.  I'm fairly certain that this is not
actually correct.

> CPAN is not the licensing arm of the Perl community nor do we wish to
> be. We respect the freedom of the developers to write their code,
> license it as they see fit and upload it with the same respect we give
> them and so far we have seen no reason to rethink this practise.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with this.  The only thing that I've
seen anyone ask for is some semi-standardized way of being able to
determine what license a given module was released under.  In some ways,
the problem is similar to finding the module README or version number,
which are already handled automatically by the indexer, and I can think of
some similar ways in which the licensing information could be handled.

It may be more work than the benefit justifies; I'm not disagreeing with
that.  But the phrasing of your response sounded like you were objecting
to an attempt to force license terms on people, and I think that's a straw
man.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>