Okay. Since you seem to read your own posts and not see what I see there, and you've brought up the relevant portion of the FSF definition, I'll quote both:

From your original post:

And I take it you've discussed licensing with MJD

From the FSF definition:

Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission.

There is the conflict in black and white and no amount of back-peddling on your behalf will change it.

For all your sentiments towards the ideal of free software, the rest of your words and foundless accusations serve only to deminish and damage the case for it, and increase the insecurity of those attempting to utilise it.

Aaah, now I get it. This sub-sentence was in fact specifically aimed at the fact that Devel::Trace does not include a licensing statement. I looked up the package on CPAN, to see who the author was and to see what license he had put it under. I didn't find a license, and given that Moron was talking about a paranoid corporate environment I included the licensing bit in my sentence.

You can choose not to believe that this is the case (and your reply to AM lower down shows you don't), but you should read my posts again I think. In my reply to stvn I start off by explaining how copyright is automatic and finish the paragraph with "No FLOSS license I know gives up the requirement to name the author and attribute the work correctly."(note, no mention of asking the author for anything). In the fourth paragraph of that mail I talk about the requirements a free software license puts on the user and do not say that they need to contact the author for anything, and I repeat this in the fifth paragraph. In this reply to your post I again explain the moral requirements of the PAL as I understand it (no mention of contacting the author) and then go on to explicitly say "Specifically I never said you need to contact every module author before using or integrating their code". I go on to point out that you are in far greater danger if you take a piece of unlicensed code from Usenet or a colleague than if you take a freely licensed module from CPAN.

For the sake of being explicit and at the risk of repeating myself: I never claimed and do not hold the opinion that a user of a module with a free software license needs to contact the author for any purpose (except if it's a GPL module and he wishes to relicense it under a different license). It would be quite ridiculous of me to claim that, since the licenses themselves say no such thing and I know of no reasonable supporting argument for such a claim by anyone (including the FSF). It is however required and IMO important that the user retain the license and copyright notice when modifying that module. And this requirement is important enough to sue over it, because without it the whole copyleft scheme falls apart.

Man, I wish you'd said at the beginning that this was what irked you about my post, we could have saved us a lot of typing (well, I guess you did in a way and I replied, but it was wrapped up in other arguments and we both missed it). But I'm relieved I finally understood this, I just couldn't for the life of me make sense of what you were getting at. And again rereading my posts I can see how you could read that subtext into them (even though it was never there), so I apologise for not being clear enough.

Also "foundless accusations" is a bit harsh, don't you think? I took pains not to accuse anyone of anything. You may consider my question to be an implicit accusation and I'll have to live with that but that is jumping to conclusions (something you and others have accused me of doing).


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

Haven't we determined that Devel::Trace isn't free software though? There's no statement in the code or the documentation that I can see that allows it to be freely used. That means that the default copyright laws apply, which means no-can-do unless you're claiming fair use or something.

In that specific instance yes, but triwhan's first statement was made before that had been established by stvn.

tirwhan can claim that he knew that when he made the statement about that specific piece of code, and everything else he has said in this subthread is aimed only at modules in a similar state of "no licence attached", and I would not be able to dispute it, but that is certainly not the impression I get from reading those posts. Nor does it fit with the tone and phrasing of his subsequent posts.

Even ignoring the assumptions he made when asking the question, the general feel is that "You cannot use free software without the copyright owners permission--even if thay haven't added an explicit copyright notice". And that absolutely flys in the face of every interpretation I have seen, heard or read of the FSF position.

---

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.

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).

Open software licenses put restrictions on the distribution (and legal precedence has established that 'distribution' means 'crossing the company boundary') of software. Open software licenses can't be applied to the situation you describe - they'd only get into effect if the code from that project is sold, or given away.

You're wrong, read section 1 and 2 of the GPL and/or talk to the FSF. If you take a piece of GPL code and copy it into your own project you are modifying the original code. Such modification is only allowed if you retain the license and original copyright notice. This is what this whole subthread is about.

Removing the copyright is not even permissible under the BSD license, only public domain (arguably) lets you do that.


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

Actually, most open software licenses, including the GPL, allows you to take someones code, remove the copyright, and incorporate it in your own project.

I'll ignore the subtle legalities (since I'm not a lawyer), but for everyone's sanity, I'd recommend *not* just blindly stripping the license off of code you want to use, even if it will only be used internally. 'Cause it'll only lead to heartache later when a few years down the line someone else wants to distribute that code. He'll assume that the organization owns the code ("Hey, there's no copyright notices! We must have wrote it.") and he won't see that he's got obligations he has to live up to. For a good example of this, see the SCO vs. Linux thing where SCO stripped the BSD license off of some code and later forgot where it came from.