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).

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.

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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.

the general feel is that "You cannot use free software without the copyright owners permission--even if they haven't added an explicit copyright notice".

Er, that's kind of a confusing compound sentence. I'll make two better statements.
• You can (and are encouraged to) use Free Software (FSF's definition) without the owners permission. You can also distribute modified and unmodified versions of the software with out the owner's permission, provided you make the source code available to people you distribute to.
• Anything that lacks an explicit copyright notice and doesn't include a Free Software license is *not* Free Software and can't be used as such.

I did indeed know about the fact that Devel::Trace does not contain a license when I posted my response to Moron (see my reply two posts up err, one post lower)

everything else he has said in this subthread is aimed only at modules in a similar state of "no licence attached"

No, almost everything else is aimed at modules licensed under a FLOSS license. But I never mention that one needs to contact the author again (indeed I specifically denied that this needs to happen).

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"

No, correct would be "You cannot use a piece of software (writing, music, etc.) without the author's permission if they have not added an explicit license." If a piece of software is licensed under a FLOSS license, the author has already given you the permission to use it, it's in the license.


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