I sometimes read in Debian Weekly News about discussions on debian-legal about problems with packaging perl modules for Debian because of the vagueness of the licensing terms they use. My understanding is that the phrase that causes problems is:
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. It's generated by the default tool supplied by perl to make skeleton modules (a perl script named h2xs), and I suspect that it's been adopted by other tools used to make perl modules. Could debian-legal suggest a better phrasing for that default licence line that solves the issues you have with it? Debian seems to be the most careful group when it comes to precise ramifications of licensing terms, so I would hope that any terms that pass muster here would be uncontroversial everywhere else. I realise that this is rather late, in that 5.8.1 is due out very soon, but as this is effectively a documentation patch it is likely that I can convince Jarkko to put it in. It wouldn't solve the issues with existing modules' licences, but would eliminate the problem for any new modules. I'd expect that it would be a strong influence on other module building tools, and I'd hope that it would facilitate getting existing module authors to patch their modules to a DFSG-compliant state. Nicholas Clark
