Re: Making sure "Perl" means "Perl" (was Re: licensing issues)

"Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>Ben Tilly <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > They were shipping something that they marketed as Perl, which behaved
> > differently than Perl, had been integrated into other projects, and for
> > which Larry Wall had little or no input.
>
>Controling this sort of behavior with a copyright license is very 
>difficult,
>as has been discussed here.  I have tried to do my best in the Artistic-2.0
>to mitigate this problem as much as it can be mitigated via copyright law,
>but we'll never have a perfect solution.

I still think a copyright that offers a contract (ie the
same structure as the GPL) can do it.  But the result is
complex enough that people didn't like it.

>The better solution is to have a trademark on the word "Perl", in Larry's
>name, and have the trademark license require that if they call it "Perl", 
>it
>really is the canonical Perl implementation.  (I believe I wrote an RFC 
>that
>proposed this; it's presumably currently under Larry's advisement).

This, of course, presupposes that the legal system is
actually capable of providing a solution.  My
impression (not knowing Larry directly) is that he would
not be by personality inclined to seek legal redress
even if it were clearly within his rights to do so.

As long as that is the case, what is written on paper
won't be worth all that much.  (This is not to mention
the rather large gap between how the legal system should
work in theory and how it works in practice.)

Cheers,
Ben
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