Whatever is done, it should be clear that a situation that exists today should
not be permitted in the future. It should be impossible for a (corporate)
entity, based on the GPL, to restrict the redistribution of Perl, which is a
right seemingly granted by the AL. The conbination of the GPL's freedom and the
AL's loopholes have been a primary vehicle in damage to certain areas of the
perl language and communities, by allowing a company to force user dependence
upon their commercially oriented website for our free toolset, and creating an
undeserved _de_facto_ standard based on manipulation of legal terms between the
licenses.
If perl is to be called free software, there can be no limitation on
redistribution of compiled binaries. This incorrigible business practice has
become an epitome of how some open source licenses do not work.
As it stands, the two licenses can be used to contradict each other. Any draft
license should be a single entity, and should prohibit practices that have lead
to Win32 monopoly within the Perl sphere (limiting redistribution by
manipulation of legalities, and by packaging with minimal additional software).
Any entity who distributes perl in binary MUST be required to a) allow those
binaries to be redistributed freely; b) release the source, makefiles, and
modifications that have led to those binaries, including all portions of the
software [non-proprietary modules, in this case]; and c) allow for the
redistribution of those sources. If those conditions aren't met, then the
license does not provide for the "freeness" of the software it is supposed to
protect, and are just words in a README file that nobody actually reads because
they have no meaning when put into practice.
On Sunday, September 24, 2000 6:38 PM, Ben Tilly [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
wrote:
> We have mere days to get any final RFCs in.
>
> Is there any significant objection to my proposing two?
>
> 1) Perl should switch to something like an MIT license
> together with a trademark on Perl (likely with O'Reilly
> requested to care of the details).
>
> 2) Continue dual-licensing GPL/AL with the AL being as I
> rewrote it, with 1.3 and 1.4 changed to match the GPL
> wording in section 0, and whatever changes Bradley Kuhn
> comes up with included.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben
> _________________________________________________________________________
> Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
>
> Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
> http://profiles.msn.com.
