Re: licensing

Government supported software development, GPL or BSD

Perl is available under either license.  The question with regard to
these licenses is which serves the issuer or the code's objectives.

If the government wishes to foster local development, hire local
developers to write the code and release it under either license.

People wishing to extend it in the purely public domain may extend it
under the GPL, others may establish businesses and use the code via
BSD.  Local developers will have the best chance to extend it since they
will be most familiar with it.  What you want is to have the code used,
to maximize its utility and the license should support not impede that
utility.

If the code builds on other products available under only the BSD or GPL
code, that portion of the product may only be available under that
license.  It is important to ensure that the code developed is available
to everyone, especially local developers and entrepreneurs, but also may
be extended and contributed to by people all over the world.

Depending on the kind of product one might wish to choose one license
over another but, I'd suggest making it available under either license
style in the manner of Perl.  If the government is not entirely happy
with the BSD style include a requirement that an attribution be included
on all literature about the product.

Simon de Weerdt