On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 8:38 AM, Bill Ward <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 11:08 PM, Jonathan Rockway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> >> 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? Once we have a clear definition of what should be the text in the POD section CPANTS will check if the licenses are the same. Actually I am sure we'll be able to upload a stand alone module that will check it and I think if you use Dist::Zilla you won't have to care as it will insert the right thing everywhere base on the license keyword you give it. >> 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. I know, at some of my clients the license issue is critical. Some of the downstream distributors (Debian, Fedora ) are also very picky about the licensing terms. They might be extreme but I prefer these over the other extreme that says: "oh its free software, we can do whatever want with it" and then go on and redistribute a GPL software in their proprietary application. So I'd rather make it easy to check the license. Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/blog.html
