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

"Bradley M. Kuhn" <[email protected]> wrote:
>Ben Tilly <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > I still think a copyright that offers a contract (ie the
> > same structure as the GPL) can do it.
>
>The GPL is not a contract, it's a copyright license, just like both the
>proposed AL-2.0 and the original AL.

MY understanding after having talked to a number
of licensing experts about it in other places is
that the GPL is both a copyright license and a
contract.

For instance look at item 5.  A copyright license
is a license written by the copyright holder.
There is no accepting or not accepting it.  But a
contract is an agreement, it must be accepted.
The GPL is something with terms and conditions
that you may or may not choose to accept.  If you
do not accept the contract then you do not have
any right to the freedoms it can grant.

>I believe (IANAL) that End User License Agreements can be contracts,
>particularly under UCITA, but I don't think that's a direction we want to 
>go
>in with a license for Perl.

I agree that anything that smacks of UCITA would
be a bad direction for any free software licence
(for Perl or otherwise) to go.

> > 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.
>
>Well, I don't think there's much point in inferring what Larry will do.  An
>RFC concerning the trademark/service mark is under his advisement---we'll
>just have to see what he says.
>
Yup.

Cheers,
Ben
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