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).