Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR.

Esteemed Monks,

Some few weeks ago I asked in Packaging GUI application. for advice on packaging a Tk based application. Naturally the three major contenders were

perl2exe from IndigoStar here in Toronto
PAR
PerlAPP from the Perl Developers Kit.

Initially I called IndigoStar and spoke to Indy Singh, he was most helpful and offered whatever support would be needed should I purchase the product and had difficulty packaging my Tk based application.

I also downloaded PAR, it worked pretty well as described. But eventually I saw this text in the license conditions:

Neither this program nor the associated L<pp> program impose any licensing restrictions on files generated by their execution, in accordance with the 8th article of the Artistic License: "Aggregation of this Package with a commercial distribution is always permitted provided that the use of this Package is embedded; that is, when no overt attempt is made to make this Package's interfaces visible to the end user of the commercial distribution. Such use shall not be construed as a distribution of this Package." Therefore, you are absolutely free to place any license on the resulting executable, as long as the packed 3rd-party libraries are also available under the Artistic License.

So I passed a copy of it to our IP lawyer who responded in this fashion:

If you package a product with PAR then any modules which 'we' (the corporate we) develop can be licensed under any license terms. But if we use a third-party module, it can only be one which is licensed under the 'Artistic License' in addition to any other license it is offered under.

So, PAR was out of the question from a licensing point of view! Our applications use a proprietary module which comes from a payment processor used by two of our clients.

Sadly, the open-source alternative lost out, but what of the other two. Well, in the end I chose PerlAPP because we purchased the Komodo package from ActiveState that had the PDK included. I might have considered perl2exe except that PerlAPP is readilly available from within the Komodo IDE.

jdtoronto UPDATE After discovering that the text was not form the PAR license but from Tkpp - a GUI front end supplied in the same package our lawyers have revised their assessment of the license. See Re^2: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. for clarification.

Comment on Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by tilly (Archbishop) on Oct 29, 2004 at 19:47 UTC
I believe that your lawyer misread this. Please read these comments, send it to your lawyer, and have your lawyer get back to you on this question again. The license that covers PAR is the Artistic License, and the way that it is used in this case fits the 8'th article of the Artistic License. Therefore it does not restrict your commercial use. Period. However, as the final sentence notes, this guarantee does not necessarily apply to third party modules. If all third party modules are also available under the Artistic License (things that say that they are licensed on the same terms as Perl are), then you're automatically clear. Otherwise you might not be. Or you might be. It is wrong to assume either way. And that is what your IP lawyer's response does. Whether third party modules actually cause you a problem depends on what their licenses say. And that will vary. For instance with a BSD licensed module you will be fine. If it is only available under the GPL, then you likely have a problem. Read the license and respect it. In your specific case the question is whether the terms under which you have access to the proprietary module let you do what you want to do. I don't know that - it entirely depends on your agreement with them. Furthermore the choice of packaging application does not affect that - the copyright issue is between you and the people who own that proprietary module, the packaging application doesn't enter into it. Therefore, as I think your lawyer will verify, there was no legal reason for you to have chosen not to use PAR. That was a misunderstanding.	[reply]
Re^2: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by jdtoronto (Prior) on Oct 29, 2004 at 23:47 UTC
Her response is this: "It seems that the text which was passed to us by an employee was in fact from the Tkpp.pl programme, not the module itself. In that case a re-reading of the actual PAR distribution and the Artistic License confirms what you have been told. If the text we were given was in fact from the PAR distribution, not from just one component of it then the interpretation we discussed earlier would have been irrefutable. In the case of the payment processing module, their license is clear - you can distribute it as part of any application provided that your application only attempts to use it to communicate with their servers and no others." So, my apologies colleagues, I was mistaken as to the source of the license term cited. Thus their is no reason to choose one over. jdtoronto	[reply]
Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by itub (Priest) on Oct 29, 2004 at 19:07 UTC
I am not a lawyer, but that argument just doesn't sound logical. PAR says it is not imposing any restrictions because PAR uses the Artistic License. It also says that you should feel free to include other modules that use the Artistic License because those modules won't have any restrictions either. But it never says that you can only include modules that use the Artistic License! You might have problems with GPL modules, for example, but if Bob gives you a module under "Bob's license" that allows you to include it in a PAR package, common sense tells me that you free to do so. So I think the problem is between you and the provider of the module that you want to include.	[reply]
[OT] Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by hostyle (Scribe) on Oct 29, 2004 at 19:50 UTC
Completely off topic, but ... Indy is a great guy. I remember becoming unstuck with a bug with perl2exe at a very important client in London (I'm based in Ireland) and despite the time differential, Indy was at hand to hold my hand and give me an arcane fix (weird NT4 related bug) Saved my ass and another trip over :). Is Indy on PM by any chance?	[reply]
Re: [OT] Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by talexb (Chancellor) on Nov 04, 2004 at 16:42 UTC
Is Indy on PM by any chance? I don't believe so, but he does come out regularly to the Toronto Perl Mongers meetings .. and to the subsequent attitude adjustment libations afterwards. :) jdtoronto comes out occasionally, and dice is the fearless leader of the Toronto bid for our winning YAPC bid. I've probably missed a few .. oh, and we also see scruss (although apparently I've got his username wrong); and demerphq has also socialized with us in the past. Alex / talexb / Toronto "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds	[reply]
Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by PerlingTheUK (Hermit) on Oct 29, 2004 at 21:48 UTC
Hi, I am using PerlApp currently only company internally, I was considering similar problems and take care I am only using packages covered by the Artistic Licence or at least not GPL and similar. There is some GPL I'd love to use and my workaround is pretty sketchy and was time consuming. Yet bearing the GPL in mind I do not want to use it. Yet I fail to understand your logic. Why do you - consider to have no problems using the proprietary tools - does your lawyers advice only cover those special proprietary licences or does this also cover more open licences as the GPL? The way I understand the GPL, this becomes even more complex. Section 3 states that I have to supply anyone I give my GPL based application to with a three year warranty to supply all codes required to build my software. I have created my very own build scripts all depending on perlapp. as they would not work with perl2exe or par, I wonder if I would even have to provide licences of perlapp for whoever would like to "compile" my programms once I started including GPL sources. Wondering about the same problem I have recently written a letter to the Active State support. The answer was unfortunately unsatisfyingly short and did only provide the rather trivial answer "you can do and sell whatever you like" without any satisfactory reasoning into this matter. Cheers, PerlingTheUK	[reply]
Re^2: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by jdtoronto (Prior) on Oct 30, 2004 at 00:49 UTC
Just quickly, Para 3 of the GPL only requires the 3 year guarantee in cases where you are NOT distributing the source code with the application. jdtoronto	[reply]
Re^3: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by PerlingTheUK (Hermit) on Oct 30, 2004 at 11:09 UTC
Yes I am aware of that but it clearly means that anyone who does not want to start from scratch can contact me and ask for the sources. Which is not what I want. Cheers, PerlingTheUK	[reply]
Re: Why I chose PerlAPP rather than PAR. by gmpassos (Priest) on Oct 30, 2004 at 21:24 UTC
I use LibZip, same license of Perl. Graciliano M. P. "Creativity is the expression of liberty".	[reply]


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