The entirety of my 3 part question was in earnest.

Okay, sorry for doubting that. I've updated my post and tried to answer your questions to the best of my abilities.

I read the PAL similarly to you, albeit with the small difference that the author does not wish his code to be changed and redistributed without the changes being clearly marked (and the change made available, which is pretty much a noop for Perl anyway). I've always thought the PAL essentially asks the same things as the GPL, only it asks that the user complies, whereas the GPL demands it.

What you have done with your post is to provide ample reasons why I, as a former consultant architect, could never recommend that a client that they use any CPAN module, or maybe even perl itself on any commercial project.

WTF? I never said the things you apparently understood. Specifically I never said you need to contact every module author before using or integrating their code, nor need you respect their wishes further than what the license of the module clearly says (which permit integration into commercial codebases under clearly defined conditions).

If a module does not contain a license you are on somewhat shaky ground and you can either

• take the pragmatic approach and assume you can use the module under the same terms as other CPAN modules, which is reasonable enough for many purposes
• take the paranoid approach and try to contact the author and ask him to clarify the license under which the module is available. That clarification doesn't need to be a triplicate document signed in blood however, the simple sentence "available under the same conditions as Perl itself" is enough.

This is why it's important that modules contain license files or statements, it actually makes things easier for the user.

And what makes you think this problem is unique to the Perl world? If you take a piece of code out of the Microsoft knowledgebase, that code is copyrighted and you need to know under what conditions you can use it. If you take something from a book, the same. If you take a usenet posting from a random programmer, that is copyrighted and you need to theoretically clarify whether you can use it. Hell, if your colleague across the corridor sends you an email that email is copyrighted to him(unless his employment contract has a clause which transfers copyright ownership to his employer) and you need his permission to use it in any way. At least with CPAN modules you have the license which clarifies how you can use the code.

Tell you what though, there does seem to be some confusion on this topic (and it is highly likely I am misunderstanding or misinterpreting licensing issues in some way as well), which is not entirely unimportant. Ovid posted a question on what the Perl Foundation could do for us, and maybe it would be a good idea if it could obtain some clarification on these issues. I'll go post I've posted a request for that.

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