Re: Hopefully last draft of AL

At 07:32 PM 9/24/00 -0400, Ben Tilly wrote:

[Major snippage here]

>>That the license places any obligations or exercises any level of control
>>over the output (the equivalent of the .o file) is a *big* issue. It would
>>mean in many cases that back ends not distributed with perl (with
>>corresponding AL exemptions) wouldn't be usable in a lot of places.
>
>Why do you say that back-ends distributed with Perl would have
>AL exemptions that you couldn't get other ways?  If you read
>the license you will see that there is nothing which would stop
>a third party from developing their own fork.  If they want to
>call it Perl they would have to AL it.  (Then Larry can steal
>what he wants back.)
>
>With your nifty optimizing back end as long as they called it
>something different (necessary so it could gently co-exist with
>Perl) they can do pretty much whatever they want.

Okay, this is the crux of the misunderstanding here. The issue isn't what 
the resulting binary with the new whiz-bang optimizer (or 
perl->JVM/PostScript/C/Haskell/Forth/Visual APL++ translator) linked in is 
called. I don't have a problem with the clauses that say "It ain't pure 
perl, don't call it perl."

The issue is we're explicitly claiming full ownership of perl's internal 
state. Because of that anything that is produced based on that state will 
generally be considered a derivative work, and therefore gets the AL tacked 
on. *That* means that if someone writes a new backend (say to link perl 
into GCC's backend, or one that generates Palm code), the output of the new 
perl binary, *even if it isn't called perl*, is now considered a derivative 
work of perl and therefore covered by the AL.

By the clause I don't like, this is the default behaviour. This means that 
any bytecode produced by any backend (perl or Java) is covered by the AL, 
as well as any C code the p2C backend might generate, or any executables 
the mythic perl2exe generator might make.

I'm *assuming* here that we will put some clause in the license that 
explicitly disclaims any rights over that output over and above any rights 
on the source the bytecode came from had. What I want, ultimately, is for 
that disclaimer to be extended to any variant of perl no matter what the 
name is. The clause in question implicitly prevents that, and that's what I 
don't like.

It's certainly possible I'm misreading the license, and if that's the case 
I'll stop. I don't think it is, though.

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
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                                      teddy bears get drunk