Re: Why (7) and (8) in the Artistic-2.0 (was Re: RFC 346 (v1) Perl6's License Should be (GPL|Artistic-2.0))

David Grove wrote:

> No, no. Don't misunderstand. I'm in _favor_ of ActiveState making a profit
> and selling this other software. What I'm looking to prohibit is the
> proprietarization of perl itself. Making tools that use perl helps the
> community, even if those products are commercial. Proprietarizing perl and
> selling it does nobody any good. We don't need forks, and we don't need
> proprietary, forced, de-facto standards.

A GPL-only license would be the only real way to achieve the goal of keeping
all forks of perl free software.  However, this is something the Perl
community explicitly *does not want*, so I have no interest in even asking
for it.  It might fit with my personal politics, but it is antithetical to
the community, and therefore shouldn't even be considered.

 
> Under the current license as I see it now, there's nothing to prevent AS
> or M$ from taking the perl source, proprietarizing it, and selling it as
> an improved perl in binary form, using predictable marketing and business
> methods, to make an entire community dependent upon them for perl itself.
> It just needs to be redistributable in source and binary if it's
> perl. Everything else is fine and dandy.

This is the case---if they call it the same name as Package, the source must
be Freely Available.  They can still call it VisualPerl if they install it
to a different place.  Only a trademark on Perl can stop that.
 

-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn  -  http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE516cA53XjJNtBs4cRArruAJwNso9paxXWhzQ1VaH/btJwOJxtQwCfV4EM
Xn0lEIxyRRTaCTQCNfXNZyo=
=5nfr
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----