Greetings Fellow Monks!

A current thread on debian-legal which spilled over from debian-perl is discussing the oft-used licensing statement prevalent in many perl modules. Specifically, this term: 
Copyright: Copyright (c) Year Your Name Here. All rights reserved. This
program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
Obviously, members of the perl community know that this (currently) means that modules bearing this copyright are licensed under the GPL and Artistic License. However, what happens if Perl changes licenses to the Clarified Artistic License and the GPL?

A few people on debian-legal have suggested (myself included) that authors of modules begin to specify explicitly which licenses their module is released under to avoid confusion. The advantages of this is that the license that your code is under will be known to you. The disadvantage is that you will have to change the licensing terms of your modules, both initially, and whenever there is a legal problem with one of the licenses. In other words, your new module copyright would read (from the perl copyright itself): 
Copyright Year, Your Name Here. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of either:

a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
   Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later
   version, or

b) the "Artistic License" which comes with Perl.

What are your thoughts about this? Is this something that should be clarified in the various module creation documentation and/or on cpan?

Update: Some people have wisely pointed out that you should probably use the GPL version 2 instead of version 1. I agree completely. The above is merely the copyright statement included in perl itself.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Licensing of Perl Modules
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Feb 05, 2003 at 23:00 UTC
    I don't see what the problem is. It's known that Debian is very picky on license issues. It's also known that Perl *isn't*, that Larry *doesn't* want a very tight license (there's a reason that the AL is vague - the AL is a declaration of intend, and not a legal document like the GPL), and that most CPAN authors don't really care (hence the "under the same terms as Perl" clause).

    Frankly, I don't think Perl or the CPAN authors should change. If Debian wants a strong position on licensing, good for them. If that means they have to drop software from their distribution, than that's the price they pay. It's their choice. I'm all for free software, but I loathe all the hassle that surrounds licensing.

    I'm a Debian user myself and I couldn't care less whether some Perl module from CPAN was included or not. If you can't type 

        perl -MCPAN -eshell
    cpan> install Foo::Bar Quux::Fnurd

    [download]

    you're probably not going to use those modules anyway. There's lots of software I like to use. Do you really think I won't use it because it wasn't included on the Debian CDs I own? Come on.

    Programmers won't collectively flee to Python just because Debian doesn't include a bunch of freely available CPAN modules on their CD's.

    Abigail

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[d/l]
Re: Licensing of Perl Modules
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 05, 2003 at 02:28 UTC
    Perl licensing has bigger problems than that.

    The Artistic License sounds nice, but legally is clear as mud.

    If only the problems stopped there. Grab an old version of Perl. Grab a current one. Read the Artistic License that comes with both. They are significantly different. You may well wonder how this legal trick was achieved...

    Oh, and Perl 1 was produced by an employee (Larry Wall) at the NSA during work hours as part of his job. If the US Govt wanted to press the point, Larry probably didn't really own the copyright.

    Do you really want to open this can of worms?

    And not to pick nits, but the FSF has not recommended the use of version 1 of the GPL in many, many years. If anyone does follow your advice with new code, they should specify version 2 or better.

[reply]
      And not to pick nits, but the FSF has not recommended the use of version 1 of the GPL in many, many years. If anyone does follow your advice with new code, they should specify version 2 or better.
      That's correct, but I didn't mean to suggest that people should use those terms. Those just happen to be the terms that perl is currently released under.
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Re: Licensing of Perl Modules
by Jenda (Abbot) on Feb 05, 2003 at 15:16 UTC

    I read the

    Copyright: Copyright (c) Year Your Name Here. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
    as
    If the license conditions were good enough for Perl they are good enough for me.

    I might spend a lot of time trying to read (and understand) the legal mumble, but is it really worth the effort? Maybe we should change the text to something like "... the same terms as Perl version X.X or higher"

    Keep in mind that specifying that the module uses the same licence(s) as Perl means that its users do not have to wonder whether they can use it. If they can use Perl, they can use the module. Fullstop. Cool.

    Jenda

[reply]
      "... the same terms as Perl version X.X or higher"

      That's actually a really good idea, especially with the addition of a simple "or higher at your option". The main source of the confusion was trying to figure out if authors meant follow perl's terms, perl's terms at the moment I write this, follow perl's terms at the moment I write this or any later terms at your option.

      As far as the licensing/wondering issue, that's precisely what I was concerned about, the fact the legality of using the module was less clear than it probably should have been.
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Re: Licensing of Perl Modules
by grantm (Parson) on Feb 05, 2003 at 02:18 UTC

    I say it's not broken, so lets not fix it. Debian has included Perl modules before so what's suddenly changed?

    Any proposed 'solution' which requires an update to every distribution on CPAN is unlikely to be successfull. Any 'solution' which requires every distribution on CPAN to include a copy of either or both of the GPL and the Artistic license as at the release date of the distribution also doesn't sound like a terribly good idea.

[reply]

      IIRC, the GPL requires that you include a copy with the licensed work. (After checking...) Yep, the end of clause 1 reads "...give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program". In other words, all distributions of a GPLed program must include a copy of the license.

      Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

[reply]
      Any proposed 'solution' which requires an update to every distribution on CPAN is unlikely to be successfull.

      I don't think that anyone is yet calling for all authors of modules to change their licenses instantly. However, it was a problem of clarity in the licensing that was brought up by one of the ftpmasters responsible for allowing packages into Debian, and a few other individuals, many of whom also package perl modules for Debian, thought it was a significant problem.

      I personally am going to be asking my upstreams of the modules that I package to clarify the terms that their modules are released under, unless the discussion here (and/or) on debian-legel leads me to believe that it's not a problem.
[reply]

        Far from simplifying matters, I think that having each CPAN author 'clarify' their licensing position is only going to make things more confusing.

        The current situation is that Perl can be used under either the GPL or the Artistic license. A user can evaluate those licenses (which come with Perl) and make their own decision on whether they are happy to use Perl under those terms.

        A CPAN module is effectively an extension to Perl. If the module contains a clear statement that it is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself then the user does not need to make another decision. They have already decided Perl's licensing terms are acceptable. They can see that the module they want to use is licensed under the same terms and they can carry on.

        On the other hand, if each module author 'clarified' their licensing position by re-stating Perl's licensing terms then a user would need to read that statement and any accompanying license files and repeat the decision making process. The more words that a module author uses to clarify things, the more chance there is of making a mistake or introducing an inconsistency.

        I'm not saying that every CPAN module should have the exact same licensing terms - authors should continue to have the freedom to choose. But, if they choose to use 'the same terms as Perl itself' then they are saying to a potential user "don't worry about the license - you already made your decision about Perl's license and this is the same".

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Re: Licensing of Perl Modules
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Feb 05, 2003 at 09:32 UTC
    And what about BACKPAN (backpan has backissues of cpan ;D)?

    I think if all the *cpan.org sites simply included a little link at the bottom about copyright, which would clarify what perl authors mean when they say "the same terms as Perl itself" and/or if that document was included in the root cpan direcotry, there would be no issue.

    update: Actually, you know what, there is no issue.

    How are Perl and the CPAN modules licensed?

    MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
    ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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