Chris Nandor wrote:
>
>At 10:03 -0400 2000.09.25, Ben Tilly wrote:
> >Chris Nandor wrote:
[...]
> >I think David is confused about this situation, but what he
> >said is not entirely false. Anyone who wants can get Perl,
> >make changes under the GPL, and release the hacked up version
> >under the GPL. You would now have a GPL-only fork of Perl
> >which it is unlikely anyone would actually use, but you would
> >have a version of Perl with rather more strict redistribution
> >requirements than the current one.
>
>Yes, but no one can restrict the redistribution of Perl (or perl). You
>can, perhaps (though I am not entirely convinced), restrict the
>distribution of some specific distribution, but not perl (or Perl) itself.
The original cannot be restricted. A derivative could be. My
understanding is that the intent of the AL is to keep there from
being a proprietary derivative named perl with restricted source.
(If it is not named perl then that is explicitly allowed.)
>David makes it sound like no one can distribute a Win32 perl because
>ActiveState restricts ActivePerl distribution (which is, of course, what he
>is referring to, though he doesn't come out and say it). I know that he
>doesn't believe no one can distribute a Win32 perl, but that is what he
>actually states: that a company can restrict redistribution of perl. And
>they can't.
True. However it would take some poking around through
ActiveState's Perforce server to see if all of the changes to
Perl that go into their point releases are released in source
form. If not then getting those bug fixes outside of the main
release schedule might be hard. (I suspect you could actually
find them though, and if not then that is more likely an
oversight than malicious intent.)
Certainly at one point (back in the 3xx releases, based on Perl
5.003_07) it was impossible to get source to the Win32 port that
was done by ActiveState, and significant differences existed
between it and regular Perl. With Perl 5.005 that issue went
away and to the best of my knowledge ActiveState has been a very
good corporate citizen since.
Cheers,
Ben
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