Yes, and? It's well known that Debian believes in the saying "there's no such thing as 90% free". Something is free, or it isn't, and they have (at least for themselves) a pretty clear idea what is free, and what isn't. Now, if we look at the distribution conditions of perlreftut, it's quite restrictive. It's more restrictive than the Perl distribution itself, which allows you to accept it under either the Artistic license, or the GPL (perlreftut doesn't allow the latter). It also doesn't give you any rights to distribute it outside of the Perl distribution.

I can't blame Debian for not distributing perlreftut. In fact, if they accept Perl under the GPL, they legally are not allowed to distribute perlreftut; perlreftut doesn't give you the option of accepting it under the GPL.

In fact, I wonder whether it's right to have perlreftut in the Perl distribution if it has conditions that violate the overall conditions of the Perl distribution. Perhaps this is something that needs to be discussed on p5p.

Abigail