On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Jonathan Rockway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> * On Thu, Oct 23 2008, Bill Ward wrote: > > Perhaps when you upload to PAUSE without a license in META.yml it > > could actually replace the META.yml with one that has a license, based > > in input from an HTML form? Would that be too weird? I think it's > > technically feasible. > > So if the user doesn't provide information, PAUSE should just make it > up? That doesn't sound very valuable. Now someone reading the license > field will have to wonder whether they are looking at the real license > or just the license that was randomly selected by PAUSE. This negates > the entire usefulness of the field. Of course not, don't be absurd. But when the user is uploading the module, the PAUSE web interface could prompt them to select the license. > Also, altering the contents of a distribution will break the signature > generated by Module::Signature. That's a good point though. > Some other thoughts... is the license specified in the META.yml legally > binding in any way? If not, anyone using the module will have to look > at the rest of the distribution to determine its license, again negating > the usefulness of this field. Another good point. One could put GPL in the META.yml but have a LICENSE section in the POD that says "same terms as Perl itself" -- which one wins? > Then again, I, as the author, don't really know what license my > distributions are distributed under. I could pick one, but can I really > be sure that it applies? If I use Term::ReadLine and it picks the > Term::ReadLine::Gnu, is my module GPL now? > > I don't know and I don't care. Does anyone else? Some people care a lot; to others it doesn't matter so long as it's available. There are some major differences between the licenses, mainly around what can be done with derivative works, but that's a lot less likely to be an issue with a Perl module.
