Re: licensing issues

Dave Rolsky <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>On Sun, 14 Jan 2001, David Grove wrote:
>
> > Ladies and gentlemen, maybe licensing isn't the method of choice of
> > preventing the abuses that are harming this community, but it seems to 
>be
> > the appropriate place to affect at least one of the two:
>
>What abuses?  What the heck are you talking about?
>
>Why are people suddenly freaking out about licenses?  Perl's dual license
>seems to have served it well, since AFAIK there has never been a major
>issue where someone has been in violation of the license (intentional or
>otherwise).

Actually there was a serious issue before the OnePerl
effort.  ActiveState was shipping binaries based on
5.003 except modified in ways that not only were not
public, but could not be made public because they
involved intellectual property owned by Microsoft.
Sarathy had his 5.004 (_02 IIRC) based binaries that
he ported and compiled.  Where you could use them, they
were preferable.  But they could not be used with a lot
of ActiveState modules.

At the time there was considerable illwill towards
ActiveState, and disagreement about whether or not
ActiveState was in violation of the Artistic license.
They claim to this day that they were not.  Reading the
license I think that they were in violation of section 3.
(They come closest to satisfying section 3c, but did not
ship unmodified executables.)

That situation definitely had ActiveState violating the
spirit of the Artistic License, whether or not they were
violating the letter.  And resolving that situation took
a lot of work, including a substantial investment by
O'Reilly in ActiveState.

I know that after that I would have been far slower to
ever trust ActiveState were it not for the vocal support
of people like Sarathy.  Even so the bad taste of having
been a Windows user back then (this was around the same
time that I started with Perl) has left me willing to
believe the worst of ActiveState.

>What problem are you aiming to fix?
>
> > 2) The existing policies (or lack thereof) or lack of attention or 
>concern
> > allow a(ny) company to purchase strong control in the development and
> > direction of the Perl language for proprietary goals (which is why I 
>asked
> > the question about 5.005_03... linux distros are outright rejecting it
> > everywhere, as is FreeBSD).
>
>Uh-oh, here comes the ActiveState rant.  AFAICT, your ActiveState
>hostility mostly stems from your assertion that they were responsible for
>the release schedule of 5.6.0.  This has two big assumptions:

What David has said to me in the past indicates that the
majority of his hostility towards them results from his
having worked there and seen things that got him really
upset.

>1.  That it was released too early.  I happen to agree but that's largely
>irrelevant.

I think it needed to be released for other reasons.

But as I have said before, I have no problems with 5.6.0
having been released when it was.

>2.  That AS somehow had a vested interest in this early release and
>knowingly forced a buggy 5.6.0 on the community.

FWIW David was working at ActiveState when the 5.6.0
release happened.  He claims inside information.

>Even agreeing with #1, I have yet to see any evidence on #2.

David's claim is that for a company trying to establish
itself as the One True Source of Perl, it is good when
their binaries are objectively better than building from
source.  In my eyes this is plausible, but the claim is
not proven.

>And mind you, I am very anti-corporate and skeptical of all that
>corporations do.  Yet I still think you have no case.

I am perhaps a little more sympathetic because I was a
Windows user during previous issues with ActiveState.

Note, that I am sympathetic but not totally convinced.
Were I to only take into account what David has said in
private to me, I would be convinced.  But I hate ever
making my mind up after only hearing one side of the
story.  Clearly while working there something happened
that got him very upset.  But right now there is
something of the feel of a "he said, she said" fight
after a marriage breaks up...

Cheers,
Ben

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