EvanCarroll has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Under what license is the core-perl documentation under, and who "owns" the copyright on it? I can't find a mention anywhere. I'd like to redo the perl-book at wikibooks.org, but they require the perldocs already be under the gfdl to be included. Logically this will be more difficult with core-modules.
The core perl documentation is owned by several parties (which is to say, either the author(s) of the specific documentation and/or Larry Wall or some other legal person that has been assigned the copyright by its authors. See for instance perlreftut). Most of it is (probably) under the perl license (i.e. artistic/gpl) though some of the doc files have additional copyright/licensing comments and others do not specify any license in the resulting manpage. In your case, I would recommend you review each perldoc/manpage and its source file separately.
As far as I know, none of the core docs are under the GFDL.
As a side-note, opinion is divided on whether the GFDL is any good (compared to the GPL - Debian for instance considers the GFDL to be a non-free license)
update:GFDL describes the Gnu Free Documentation License and some of its criticisms.
I would have to concurr with GFDL as being a bad thing. I once was considering creating a phone based service to provide access to Wikipedia and as far as I could tell it wasn't practical.
Sure you can reproduce the content, but you have to include the disclaimers and other superfluous information as required by the GFDL that in many cases doubled the call time.
A few emails to the FSF and they admitted the GFDL didn't even permit audio reproduction and suggested I work with the copyright owner to arrange other terms. (So services for blind people are a no-go).
P.S.- if you want to create a monopoly over a collection of content, the GFDL is the way to do it. Just add some ridiculously long text that has to accompany any use of the content and it becomes worthless to others.