Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing)

For most small projects (modules in particular) the standard blurb of 'This project is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself' should suffice.

However, if you're planning anything larger than a module, I encourage you to use one of the GNU licenses. While there's no case law currently backing them, they were written with the assistance of law professors and should be fairly solid. The enforcability of the artistic license on the other hand, has been questioned many times. From Bruce Perens essayon the open source definition...

It is, in my opinion, a sloppily-worded license, in that it makes requirements and then gives you loopholes that make it easy to bypass the requirements. Perhaps that's why almost all Artistic-license software is now dual-licensed, offering the choice of the Artistic License or the GPL.

Section 5 of the Artistic License prohibits sale of the software, yet allows an aggregate software distribution of more than one program to be sold. So, if you bundle an Artistic-licensed program with a five-line hello-world.c , you can sell the bundle.

He goes on to list a couple more flaws in the license. Definately worth a read for those who are considering licenses.

Comment on Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing)

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Re: Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing) by metadoktor (Hermit) on Mar 23, 2002 at 02:16 UTC
While there's no case law currently backing them, they were written with the assistance of law professors and should be fairly solid. The GNU license being written by law professors means nothing. I recall many law professors being interviewed about what kind of decision they thought a court would rule and the court chose a decision which was the complete opposite of what all the law professors were saying. Go figure. In effect, the judgment is based on what the judge's ideology is. metadoktor "The doktor is in."	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing) by cjf (Parson) on Mar 23, 2002 at 10:53 UTC
Well, I'd certainly trust most law professors more than the average Perl hacker to write a license. The GPL might not be flawless, we'll have to wait and see what the courts decide, but until then I see it as one of the more solid licenses out there.	[reply]