On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Ken Williams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:17 AM, David Cantrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> So, in summary, here's my objections to the >> current 'license' field in META.yml: >> >> * poorly documented; >> * limited range of options for licences; >> * only one licence per distribution >> >> The first is fixable so I'm not too bothered by it. The second and third >> are fundamental design flaws which make it unfit for purpose. > > Your proposal doesn't seem to address the second point in any way. > > I'm also not thrilled with how it addresses the third, since it seems > to me that any distribution with such complex licensing terms probably > can't be covered by such a mechanism anyway. For instance, if I have > A.pm under GPL and B.pm under BSD, what happens when they call each > other? Does that constitute encapsulation and/or usage as a library? > Such matters generally have to be spelled out explicitly. > > I agree that the second point is a problem. I'd like to solve it by > delegating to Software::License. Anything it knows about should be a > valid choice.
I think supporting options like "other" or "mixed" should resolve most of these cases. Sure, automatic tools that use this field will be out of luck, but that should be a fairly small minority.
