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.

In reply to Licensing of Perl Modules by dondelelcaro

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