develooper Front page | perl.module-authors | Postings from October 2008

Re: Integrating license related things of CPAN

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Bill Ward
Date:
October 29, 2008 22:18
Subject:
Re: Integrating license related things of CPAN
Message ID:
3d2fe1780810292218p62d0bcf7sc6f163a61ee2a637@mail.gmail.com
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Ken Williams <kenahoo@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:17 AM, David Cantrell <david@cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
>> So, in summary, here's my objections to the
>> current 'license' field in META.yml:
>>
>> * poorly documented;
>> * limited range of options for licences;
>> * only one licence per distribution
>>
>> The first is fixable so I'm not too bothered by it.  The second and third
>> are fundamental design flaws which make it unfit for purpose.
>
> Your proposal doesn't seem to address the second point in any way.
>
> I'm also not thrilled with how it addresses the third, since it seems
> to me that any distribution with such complex licensing terms probably
> can't be covered by such a mechanism anyway.  For instance, if I have
> A.pm under GPL and B.pm under BSD, what happens when they call each
> other?  Does that constitute encapsulation and/or usage as a library?
> Such matters generally have to be spelled out explicitly.
>
> I agree that the second point is a problem.  I'd like to solve it by
> delegating to Software::License.  Anything it knows about should be a
> valid choice.

I think supporting options like "other" or "mixed" should resolve most
of these cases.  Sure, automatic tools that use this field will be out
of luck, but that should be a fairly small minority.

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About