Re: I think the AL needs a rewrite

Ask Bjoern Hansen wrote:
>
>On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Ben Tilly wrote:
>
>[...]
> > Because vagueness has led to being overly permissive.
> >
> > Take a look at how Microsoft "released" the changes that they
> > made to Kerebos.
>
>FUD, afaik. Microsoft reimplemented Kerberos, they didn't change any
>software.

Sorry, I thought most would be familiar with this story.

This is not FUD.  Microsoft reimplemented Kerberos but they
defined a previously undefined field and made their software
require that field to be defined in order to fully interoperate.
This was a huge issue for efforts like SAMBA.

After much squawking they "released" their changes in the form
of an executable that presented you with a very restrictive
license to agree to before they presented you with the
documentation of their changes.  This did nothing to improve
the situation since the license was specifically intended to
ensure that you were not planning to try to get a potentially
competing product to interoperate.

>If they had it would probably have worked better.

The technical merits of the change are neither here nor there.
The presenting of the changes at no charge yet under terms that
would be unacceptable for changes to Perl to be presented in
was my point.

Free of charge is not the same as free to incorporate into Perl.
My understanding is that the point of allowing modifications if
the modifications are freely released is that Larry is then able
to choose wether or not to incorporate those changes into Perl,
hence those changes should be considered proposed modifications
of Perl and not attempts to circumvent Larry's ultimate artistic
control.

How would you feel if someone "freely released" a change to Perl
with a licence attached which would prevent anyone who looked at
it from ever contributing to the Perl core (but at no charge)
and pointed out that this indeed satisfied their obligations
under 3a?  If the Perl community in general would not like it,
then Perl should not be released under a license which allows it.

Cheers,
Ben
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.