I know most of you don't want to think about this or don't care at all but others do. So I'd like to clean things up a bit in the way CPAN modules are licensed. Let's think about it as a necessary evil...
While I respect the right of everyone writing whatever they want as license I would like to make sure that those who don't know or don't care can have an easy way to say that they distribute their code under license X. I would like this to be correct for the major values of X: "the Perl license" Artistic 2.0 Artistic 1.0 GPL Others can be added too and that's actually one of my questions here. Which license should be added? Thomas and I would like CPANTS to be able to check that modules declare about their license in a way acceptable by corporations, lawyers and even Linux distributions. So here are some items that should be checked. I am thinking aloud, please comment: - CPAN distributions should have a LICEN[CS]E file with the exact text of the license in it - Each distributed files should have a short version of the license. Maybe this would only mean the .pm and .pl files, maybe only the .pm files, I am not sure - Each distro should have a META.yml and a license field in it for machines to check the license. (this one is probably not a legal requirement but it will help the various automated tools) - Preferably every file in the distro should be under the same license, The LICEN[CS]E file should hold the text of this license and META.yml should declare the same license. When there are portions of the distro under different licenses, (e.g. I think DBD::SQLite) there should be a clear indication of this (how? where?) I think TPF should get legal advice on how and where this information should be written? TPF should also get legal advice on what should we do with our current text on the existing distros? Changing the license of a module could be an issue as well. Then TPF should publish some of the recommended options. BTW There are several tools out there: Software::LicenseUtils http://search.cpan.org/dist/Software-License/ lists the full text of some of the licenses. Maybe it is enough to make your distro dependent on Software::License and say the license is the specific version of that module? Software::LicenseUtils in the same distro can help recognizing licenses within the pod. Case study: when using Software::LicenseUtils 0.003 to check the license of Module::CPANTS::Analyse 0.81 - the code of CPANTS - it did not find the license. I think this happened because SLU is checking some wording and MCA had a different wording of the same intention. I don't know if that matters for the legal departments - TPF should find that out - and then make sure we are checking the same thing legals will. comments? regards Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/blog.html Test Automation Tips http://szabgab.com/test_automation_tips.html
