RH 7.3 comes with Perl 5.6, while RH 9 comes with Perl 5.8. Maybe the older Perl did something with this call to strict that actually worked. It looks like a bug to me, which may be why it no longer works.

Correct usage would be this:

use strict;
use vars qw(@ISA);
[download]

Youl could use "our" instead of "use vars", but I think that's silly and it doesn't work on Perls older than 5.6.