RE: RFC idea

Chris Nandor wrote:
>
>At 10:42 -0400 2000.09.25, Ben Tilly wrote:
> >The original cannot be restricted.  A derivative could be.  My
> >understanding is that the intent of the AL is to keep there from
> >being a proprietary derivative named perl with restricted source.
> >(If it is not named perl then that is explicitly allowed.)
>
>Right, and there is no (to my knowledge) any restricted derivative named
>"perl".  There is ActivePerl, but again, "ActivePerl" ne "perl".  It is a
>different name.  If one wants to stop the inclusion of the name within a
>different name, then you need to use trademark (as already noted) or simply
>add that to the licensing.
>
To the best of my knowledge there is no such derivative either,
and the intent of the original (and my revised) Artistic License
is that there should be none.
>
> >True.  However it would take some poking around through
> >ActiveState's Perforce server to see if all of the changes to
> >Perl that go into their point releases are released in source
> >form.  If not then getting those bug fixes outside of the main
> >release schedule might be hard.  (I suspect you could actually
> >find them though, and if not then that is more likely an
> >oversight than malicious intent.)
>
>Yes, but I don't care.  If they want to have something not called "perl"
>(which is what they have) and not release all the changes as source, then
>that is their business.  If the community doesn't like it, it will release
>its own Win32 version, actually called "perl," to compete.

At one point ActiveState had something called "perl.exe" to
which source was not available, which from scripts would be
called by the name of "perl".  I assure you that any binary
released on Windows under the name "perl" to compete would be
somewhere between zip and nada on the usefulness scale because
of how file extensions work.

That issue is long past.  Today not only is source available,
but the ActiveState modifications that could be were merged
back into the mainstream Perl.  In addition ActiveState is now
hosting the main development server, and has been employing a
number of key Perl people.  (Including Sarathy.)

Personally I think that complaints about ActiveState's current
behaviour are probably due to misunderstandings and/or simple
paranoia.

Cheers,
Ben
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