ActivePerl License (was Re: RFC idea)

Now that the RFCs have been frozen and things look a bit calmer I would
like to take the chance to clear up a few misconceptions about the
ActivePerl license:

On Tue, 26 Sep 2000 19:38:35 +0200, "Philip Newton" <[email protected]>
wrote:

>On 25 Sep 2000, at 13:05, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
>> Is there anything that stops me from taking my binary copy
>> of Perl from ActiveState, cutting it to CD, and handing it to
>> someone else?  I thought not!
>
>Yes, there is. Read 
>http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/License_Agreement.html 
>and 
>http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/redistribution_info.html .

The redistribution restrictions cover the ActivePerl package as a whole,
not the version of Perl contained in that package.

ActivePerl contains a binary distribution of Perl.  This Perl is still the
"Standard" version as specified by the Artistic License:  it is our policy
to make sure bug fixes are first accepted into the Perl development track
before we integrate them back into our repository.  There are only a few
exceptions, like buildinfo, icons etc.  Whenever we make a release of
ActivePerl, we check out the complete build tree from Perforce and make
this source tree available too.  The version of Perl included in
ActivePerl is built from this tree without further modifications.  We also
make an annotated diff against the latest maintenance release available.

The sources for all public releases of ActivePerl based on 5.6 can be
found here:

    ftp://ftp.activestate.com/ActivePerl/src/5.6/
e.g.
    ftp://ftp.activestate.com/ActivePerl/src/5.6/AP618_diff.txt
    (changelog is at the very end)

There are no restrictions on what you can do with these sources beyond
what is specified by the Perl license.  Of course we do expect people to
change the buildinfo strings ("Build by ActiveState..." etc.) before they
distribute a binary build based on these sources.

But this source tree doesn't support recreation of the complete ActivePerl
distribution.  E.g. on Windows, ActivePerl contains the following
additional components:

* PerlScript - an ActiveX scripting engine
* PerlIS     - an IIS plugin
* installer  - an MSI based installation program

The complete ActivePerl package (or the bundled components not belonging
to Perl itself) are only made available under the ActivePerl license.  But
you definitely can build a version of Perl based on the ActivePerl source
tree and cut it to a CD.

Jan Dubois
ActivePerl Product Manager