The point is, that up till now, I was reasonably confident that it was legally "safe" for anyone to use CPAN modules for their own purposes--whatever those purposes may be.

The length, depth and intracacies of all the various forms of GPL licence agreements are such that it is impossible for any indiviudual or company to arrive at a conclusion: "Yes I can use this in my commercial project".

Such conclusions will require years of case law. And that case law will need to be repeated in every jurisprudence. The case law is simply not available for any form of GPL yet. And the variations of GPL are myriad and rising, and the problem isn't getting any easier.

I was under the impression that the Perl Artistic licence was different. I believed it to say "Here it is, make money with it if you can". It adds a few moral obligations too, but essentially it was the essence of "Free, as in free of risk and burden".

It seemed so clear to me that this was the intent of the Artist licence, that anyone adding those words, "under the same licence as Perl itself", was accepting that other people were quite likely to take their work from CPAN and use it, in whole or in part, and make money from it.

Sure, most people would frown upon someone taking their module, replacing the author's name with their own, and re-publishing it, it would be a morally objectionable act--but not cause for a law suite. This view is supported by there being a number of packages on CPAN already that basically take an existing module, reduce the code, simplifying it or it's interface and then re-publish it as X::Y::Simple.

However, the moment any one author starts throwing the terms "morally wrong" and "illegal" around when someone starts re-using code from CPAN, it calls the validity of my "assured layman's understanding" into question. And when I can no longer trust that layman's understanding, for one author or one package, it raises the spectre of requiring lawyerly intervention for each and every use made of any CPAN module, including all thise distributed with Perl itself. From that point on, all opinions not tested in case law, are off.

In a world where Xbox-360 owners have issued class-action law suites on the second day of the products availability, can any company risk CPAN authors deciding that they have cause to do something similar?