Re^14: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments.

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?

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

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Re^15: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by tirwhan (Abbot) on Dec 07, 2005 at 20:01 UTC
Well, I think I see where you're coming from. I also think you are grossly overreacting to the threat you perceive and that there are almost certainly vastly greater legal risks which you as a software architect (and by extension your customer) expose yourself constantly. And there is certainly no restriction on the purposes of a user who wants to use free software. There are a few very easily fulfilled restrictions on how he can use the software, and these are less than with any other kinds of software. I have no problem if people take free software and make money from it. I am concerned with software staying free, and the point we were discussing is rather central to that issue, given the current legal framework and political tendencies. The fact that there are not huge amounts of past law cases which support the strength of FLOSS licenses is simply due to the fact that our industry is a very young one and acceptable practices are being established as we go along. Some establish practices by fabricating anti-competitive and illegal EULAs and some establish them by trying to find ways of giving people access to their intellectual property in a way that is as painless as possible. You makes your choices and you takes your chances. Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan	[reply]
Re^16: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 07, 2005 at 21:20 UTC
I also think you are grossly overreacting to the threat you perceive No I am not. I am drawing the logical conclusions from your* statements in this thread. And I strongly suggest that you re-read, this, and this, and especially this, and then see if you are still able to make the claim that "I am concerned with software staying free,"? Because you* started this subthread by bandying the words "copyright", "sneaking", "illegal", "[im]moral" and the phrase "you'd actually be putting your company into a legally extremely vulnerable position". It is the logical conclusion from the things that you had to say in those posts that leads to my conclusions. As long as authors of "free software licenced modules", hold and state the opinions you expressed in those posts, their (your) actions call the whole basis of those licence agreements into question. All I did was draw your attention to them, and draw the logical inferences from them. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal? "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.	[reply]
Re^17: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by tirwhan (Abbot) on Dec 08, 2005 at 00:09 UTC
I re-read them. Yes, I still stand by my claim. We may have a different definition about what free software is. To make this discussion easier, maybe it would be worthwhile adopting the FSF definition just so there are no misunderstandings (I don't fully agree with it but agree enough that I can stand by it for the sake of the argument)? All I have done in this thread is clarify existing facts. If you thought the PAL or the GPL or existing laws say or mean anything different from what I have said I would very much welcome you to tell me where you think I am mistaken. This has nothing to do at all with my or anybody elses attitude towards these licenses, if you receive a piece of software under a specific license you'd better try to understand it and agree with it as it stands (regardless of what you think the author may mean but isn't saying), otherwise ask the author to change the license or don't use the software. I don't understand how you can think that anything I have said calls the basis of these license agreements in question. The basis of these agreements is the authors desire for the software to remain free as per the definition of the license. In order to guarantee this continued freedom under current legislation it is essential that authors remain in possession of the copyright to their work, otherwise the software can and will be made unfree. I've said this in another post to a subthread branch, maybe you didn't read that, I am personally not at all in favour of the existence of copyright itself. I think the world would be a far better place if copyright and other forms of intellectual property were simply abolished (and I think in the very long run it is inevitable that they will be). But as long as they exist I can not see any other way to maintain essential freedoms than by using the system against itself, as the copyleft licenses do. Take the (as yet hypothetical) case we are arguing about. A corporate employee takes a piece of free software, removes the copyright and license and integrates the code into his own project. This employee has already shown supreme disregard for the original author's wishes by ignoring the (simple and easy to fulfil) requests in the license statement. Do you think said employee or his company would care if one presented a moral argument telling them that they were not being nice? I doubt that. Luckily there is a bigger stick, which is copyright law and which forces them to comply with the authors wish. Which is why I brought up legal liability (and just to be exact, "sneaking" was a quote from Morons post). Now, if copyright law did not exist none of this would be an issue, the employee/company could take the code and do with it as they see fit and the author could just take any changes back if he wanted to, no danger to either party. But laws being what they are this one-way street does not work (other than to the detriment of freedom of the software and the original author). I wonder whether I'm being completely unclear in trying to bring this point across. From your post I get the impression that maybe you think I'm not really in favour of freedom and rather that I want a system whereby an author of an original work should have complete control over how his work is used, who uses it and for what. So to be explicit, I am not in favour of that at all, I think it would be far better if we could share ideas and works indiscriminately and freely. But that ideal world is not here and meanwhile we have to do the best we can. Which is what the various FLOSS licenses are about. Ignoring a part of these licenses willy-nilly endangers their existence, the author and the freedom of his work. Now, back to the question of logical conclusions. You have presented your view of the legal side of the software world which is that FLOSS licenses are immature and poorly tested and companies cannot rely on them to hold up in court. There is very little evidence to support this view IMO and quite a bit of evidence that suggests otherwise. The GPL has been tried and tested in courts as well as out-of-court settlements. Multi-billion dollar corporations (who have lawyers more versed in this subject than you or I) are betting their businesses on these licenses. As far as software licenses go they're not even that hard to understand by a layman. How can your logical conclusion be that businesses do not know what they are getting themselves into when they are subject to these licenses? Again, the obligations you incur when using software under a free license are not onerous at all, all you need to do is recognize the freedom of the software and the attribution to the original author. Easily fulfilled, hardly any effort. If you'd rather not make that bit of effort and prefer pay big bucks for unfree software, that's your choice. But I cannot fathom how you can arrive at the conclusion that free software is unsuitable for commercial use. And you should not infer that this free software somehow restrains you from using it in the way you see fit, because that's just not true. Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan	[reply]
Re^18: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 08, 2005 at 00:24 UTC
Re^19: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by tirwhan (Abbot) on Dec 08, 2005 at 07:51 UTC
Re^19: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by Anonymous Monk on Dec 08, 2005 at 00:51 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re^18: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by Perl Mouse (Chaplain) on Dec 08, 2005 at 01:09 UTC
Re^19: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by tirwhan (Abbot) on Dec 08, 2005 at 09:08 UTC
Re^19: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by Anonymous Monk on Dec 08, 2005 at 01:39 UTC
Re^15: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by Anonymous Monk on Dec 07, 2005 at 19:45 UTC
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". All the various forms? You mean two, right? The original GPL and the LGPL. All you have to do to be in compliance with the GPL is to make sure you distribute your source code to those who request it.	[reply]
Re^16: Why non-core CPAN modules can't be used in large corporate environments. by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 07, 2005 at 20:09 UTC
You see, even with something as simple as trying to indicate "widely available and recognised free software licencing agreements"--Ie. What I was trying to indicate when I used "GPL licences"--you need a lawyer to verify what you are saying. The FSF has found cause to make distinctions regarding the following 28 free software licence agreements (from FSF): GNU GPL. GNU LGPL Licence of Guile License of the run-time units of the GNU Ada compiler X11 licence Expat Licence Standard ML of New Jersey Copyright License Public Domain Cryptix General License Modified BSD license License of ZLib License of the iMatix Standard Function Library W3C Software Notice and License Berkeley Database License (aka the Sleepycat Software Product License) OpenLDAP License, Version 2.7 License of Python 1.6a2 and earlier versions License of Python 2.0.1, 2.1.1, and newer versions License of Perl Clarified Artistic License Zope Public License version 2.0 Intel Open Source License (as published by OSI) License of Netscape Javascript eCos license version 2.0 Eiffel Forum License, version 2 License of Vim, Version 6.1 or later Boost Software License EU DataGrid Software License The license of Ruby And those are just the "GPL compatible" ones! There is another list of 30+ "incompatible" ones, and 20 or so more including the original "Artistic licence", that are not considered "free software licences" at all. Me, I'm just a layman. I ain't about to argue with the FSF. Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal? "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.	[reply]