Hi All,

I am not looking for legal advice and won't consider any info to be advice ;)

I know that if I use Delphi to create a product, I can sell the resulting product as a commercial application. And if I need to buy a ".dll" to do something, I can probably pay a few $$$s and get a royalty free library...makes sense.

But, to run a Perl program, you need the built-in "run time environment/libraries" I know that they are covered under the liberal "Artistic License", which seems to allow me to run one of those "exe" builders on my Perl code and sell my product. It just happens to be written in Perl and not Delphi...(and the "compiler" was free)

But, if I want to use some module.pm that was written by someone and released on GPL, does that mean my product is now GPL and I have to release the source?

It seems easier if I wanted to bundle GNU grep.exe, I *think* I could do that, so long as I included the source to grep.exe and any modifications to grep.exe were release for all to use...

This seem to be the real question: "is a *.pm file (under GPL) treated as a stand-alone thing"? I noticed that most CPAN modules, that weren't under the Perl license, were GPL... (does LGPL add more confusion?)

I would really like to do 2 things.
1) Release a *useful* CPAN module for everyone to use
2) Sell a commercial utility, written in Perl

I just want to make sure I do it right...

thanks!

In reply to licensing confusion by david54321

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.