Copying Perl

dmckee has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Despite the fact that I couldn't find Perl's license in the man pages, I'm lead to believe that Perl is covered by the Artistic License... is this right? Especially since it's ActiveState Perl I'm considering

Essentially my reasoning is this:

Most Windoze users don't have Perl. So if I copied and included PERL.EXE with the package, would this work (I can't really verify this accurately on my home computer, as the rest of Perl is still present. However, the 20K exe file seems to work well separated from the rest of ActiveState Perl).

This would then be run from a batchfile with the single line:

@perl myproggie.pl

so the source isn't munged up by bat2pl ing it for Unix users.

Can anyone see any gaping holes?

Comment on Copying Perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Copying Perl by chromatic (Archbishop) on Feb 10, 2001 at 05:28 UTC
Licensing wise, you're probably okay. However, if you use any modules, you'll have to ship them too. I believe ActiveState requires at least a couple of core DLLs, so your base install is a few hundred kb, at the very least. Having your users just install AS or Indigo Perl isn't such a big deal. I've downloaded web browsers and patches larger than the installers.	[reply]
Re: Copying Perl by ahunter (Monk) on Feb 10, 2001 at 05:28 UTC
perl -v should give you all the information you need... ahunter:~ % perl -v This is perl, v5.6.0 built for i686-linux-multi Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License + or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5.0 source +kit. Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found +on this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have access to + the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Pa +ge. [download] So it's covered by either the Artistic Licence or the GPL, depending on how you want to distribute it. Oh, umm... A 20K exe file? That doesn't sound right... I think you're missing something, most likely a 900K or so DLL? Plus you'll want to include any modules that you use in your package. Plus there may be other oddities that are normally set up by ActiveState's installer... Andrew.	[reply] [d/l]
(tye)Re: Copying Perl by tye (Sage) on Feb 10, 2001 at 06:02 UTC
If you launch the script with "x:\path\to\perl script.pl", then you don't need any "oddities that are normally set up by ActiveState's installer". http://www.indigostar.com/ has a tool "perl2exe" that does all of this for you. I think you can have limited use of it for free. But I think you're better off showing people how to install a decent copy of Perl. When was the last time one Perl script was enough? (: - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]
Re: Re: Copying Perl by coolmichael (Deacon) on Feb 10, 2001 at 10:44 UTC
On ActiveState Perl v5.6.0 for windows... C:\>perl -v This is perl, v5.6.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread (with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail) Copyright 1987-2000, Larry Wall Binary build 623 provided by ActiveState Tool Corp. http://www.ActiveS +tate.com Built 16:27:07 Dec 15 2000 Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License + or the GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5. +0 source kit. Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found +on this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'. If you have acces +s to the Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Pe +rl Home Page. [download] Perl itself is 20kb, but the Perl560.dll is 648kb on Windows 2000. I think you have to have it to run. Even if you did copy perl.exe, you'd need to make sure it got into the %PATH% environment variable, or was in the same directory as the script. I think it would be easier to just distribute ActivePerl and the script together.	[reply] [d/l]