"Michael A. Chase" wrote:
> I am not a lawyer and don't even play one on TV. You'll have to ask your
> corporate counsel to look at the license options that come with Perl. As
> far as I know there is no one out looking eagerly for violators, so as long
> as you make a good faith effort to comply you should be fine.
I think that means that you should either provide your customers with the source
code for Perl and DBI and DBD::Informix and any other modules that you need, or
you should at the very least make it absolutely clear where the customer could
go and obtain the source code for themselves. That is required by the GPL
portions of the licencing, anyway; I think similar considerations apply to the
Perl Artistic Licence too.
With regard to the Informix ClientSDK, each customer needs their own separately
licenced copy of the software. This is available at the purely nominal cost of
$0.00, so it is not too onerous. You should be able to obtain this from
http://www.informix.com/evaluate.
Note that if you supply pre-compiled versions of DBD::Informix, you will need to
ensure that your customers all install the Informix software in the same place,
or all set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the correct value in all circumstances (which is a
nuisance with web servers -- and you have to build DBD::Informix with the
environment variable DBD_INFORMIX_RELOCATABLE_INFORMIXDIR=yes set).
The comments from Michael Chase, Cliff Nadler, Steven Lembark, and Jared Stil
also apply.
<GRUMP>
Personally, I tend to get stroppy with software that won't go where I want it to
go -- or, rather, it ends up as shelf-ware. That is, I have my own requirements
for where software is installed on my machines, and if what's delivered is not
relocatable, I usually don't use it very much. My versions of Perl don't live
in /usr/local; neither does any of the other Open Source software I use.
There's a reason for that; /usr/local is NFS automounted read-only by MIS, and
is always way out of date. So it is NBG to me, so I install stuff where I want
it (/usr/perl/v5.6.1, /usr/gnu, /usr/gcc/v3.0, etc). I also routinely have
multiple versions of major hunks of software around -- especially Informix
software -- so I have it installed in out of the way places like
/usr/informix/9.21.UC1 (which is actually a set of symlinks to other places
where the software is really installed, but that just adds complexity to my
explanation). So, if you tried to supply me with the software, I might get a
tad stroppy about where it goes. I might be prepared to fix things up with a
symlink to meet your requirements, but if the symlink is not adequate, I
probably wouldn't be using your software.
</GRUMP>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mahdi A. Sbeih" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Jared Still" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Michael A. Chase"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 04:54
> Subject: RE: [Re: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]]
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > What about licensing, is it okay as a company to do so?
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jared Still [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 2:28 AM
> > To: Michael A. Chase; Mahdi Sbeih; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: [Re: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]]
> >
> > Or change it to 'tar cvf - /opt | gzip -9ckit.tar.gz' and
> > it will automatically go where you want.
> >
> > On Friday 06 July 2001 14:16, Michael A. Chase wrote:
> > > There doesn't have to be anything magic about /opt. If a client doesn't
> > > have one, create it. If you tar your kit with 'tar cvf - opt | gzip -9c
> >
> > > kit.tar.gz', and have them extract it from the root directory (/),
> > everyone
> > > will have the same directory structure.
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Mahdi Sbeih" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > To: "Michael A.Chase" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Mahdi A.Sbeih"
> > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 14:03
> > > Subject: Re: [Re: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]]
> > >
> > >
> > > In this case, I have to make sure that all customers have
> > > /opt (as example) on their machines,
> > > otherwise I will need to build another
> > > kit for those customers who don't have /opt
> > > to an alternative place.
> > >
> > > Is there away to change /opt after installing and before traing?
> > >
> > > "Michael A. Chase" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > Your client will need to install your perl archive in the same directory
> > > that you built it for. Those instructions allow you to build a perl
> tree
> > > under /tmp that is meant to run under /opt. That way you can build your
> > > installation kit for other systems without messing up the copy you are
> > > building.
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Mahdi A. Sbeih" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > To: "Michael A. Chase" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 00:25
> > > Subject: RE: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]
> > >
> > > > What about @INC, since it is hardcoded when building Perl,
> > > > I read this section in installing Perl, is this what
> > > > I need to do?
> > > >
> > > > #----------------------------------------------------
> > > > # Set up to install perl into a different directory,
> > > > # e.g. /tmp/perl5 (see previous part).
> > > > sh Configure -Dinstallprefix=/tmp/perl5 -Dprefix=/opt/perl -des
> > > > make
> > > > make test
> > > > make install # This will install everything into /tmp/perl5.
> > > > cd /tmp/perl5
> > > > # Edit $archlib/Config.pm and $archlib/.packlist to change all the
> > > > # install* variables back to reflect where everything will
> > > > # really be installed. (That is, change /tmp/perl5 to /opt/perl
> > > > # everywhere in those files.)
> > > > # Check the scripts in $scriptdir to make sure they have the correct
> > > > # #!/wherever/perl line.
> > > > tar cvf ../perl5-archive.tar .
> > > > # Then, on each machine where you want to install perl,
> > > > cd /opt/perl # Or wherever you specified as $prefix
> > > > tar xvf perl5-archive.tar
> > > > #------------------------------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Michael A. Chase [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> > > > Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 10:06 PM
> > > > To: Mahdi Sbeih; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > > > Subject: Re: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > If you are going to send the client a complete kit, you should
> probably
> > > > build Perl/DBI/DBD/... in a comparable machine and send them an
> archive
> > > > of the whole perl tree. With tar and gzip or bzip2, its only a few
> > >
> > > megabytes.
> > >
> > > > perllib.so contains the actual interpreter that is invoked by 'perl'.
> > It
> > > > won't do you any good by itself, since you will also need the rest of
> > the
> > > > files that come in the perl tree to get Perl scripts to work.
> > > > --
> > > > Mac :})
> > > > ** I normally forward private questions to the appropriate mail list.
> **
> > > > Give a hobbit a fish and he eats fish for a day.
> > > > Give a hobbit a ring and he eats fish for an age.
> > > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > > From: "Mahdi Sbeih" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > > > Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2001 12:22
> > > > Subject: Re: [Re: (Fwd) Just direct me where to go]
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > We support some specific versions of Solaris and HP-UX only,
> > > > So we will not have hard time with customers, we don't want to
> > > > lert customers worry about installing since this will bring
> > > > allot of headache to our technical support dept.
> > > >
> > > > Suppose I compiled Perl, DBI and DBD::Informix, on one of our
> > > > machine, what need to be send to the customer who has the same
> > > > OS and the Same Informix.
> > > >
> > > > In the installation steps of Perl, I read a section of building an
> > > > installable tar archive of Perl, this section doesn't have any
> details,
> > > > this what I am looking for, creating an istallable Perl+DBI+DBD.
> > > >
> > > > I had read some where about making a perllib.so shared library,
> > > > I didn't find allot information about this and if this related
> > > > to my objective.
--
Jonathan Leffler ([EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED])
Guardian of DBD::Informix 1.00.PC1 -- see http://www.cpan.org/
#include <disclaimer.h>
