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Postings from June 2001
All, of course, imho: > Were something dreadful to happen to Larry and his estate chose to > change the licensing terms of the current *implementation* Well they can only do that to a copy of their own, not existing copies. While the law isn't clear on a lot of nuances related to more complex open source licenses, perl's is clear enough that it is implausible that A) a non-corrupt modern judicial system is going to interpret it in a way that allows license changes to apply retroactively to existing copies and B) they can then enforce this in a manner that truly stops a fork. (And guess which version the book authors and gurus would follow? Consider Borland's Interbase, which had a far more restrictive license, not even remotely as open as perl. Borland mucked about, so the community forked. All the gurus immediately backed the fork and the new direction was established in less than a week. Now Borland seeks to merge its fork (the original set of sources, since further developed a little) back with the community fork. This will happen, and the pragmatic strength of freedom over self-serving manipulation will have asserted itself.) > Try writing a second Perl implementation from > scratch. Indeed, Perl 6 is, afaik, a rewrite, from scratch. All you need is a community willing and able to do it. > Perl's great blessing is also it's great curse; there's a single > implementation and that *implementation* happens to be > OpenSource. If anyone concludes that a particular language with a clear spec that stands free of any given implementation is a lesser strategic risk than perl, then I think they should adopt that other language. I very much doubt they will have much success convincing those working on perl that a commitment to a spec that stands free of the current implementation would be a good use of their time, because the license is sufficiently free, and a stand alone spec that kept up with a continuously evolving and pragmatically driven thing like perl would take an inordinate amount of effort.Thread Previous | Thread Next