David Grove wrote:
> No, no. Don't misunderstand. I'm in _favor_ of ActiveState making a profit
> and selling this other software. What I'm looking to prohibit is the
> proprietarization of perl itself. Making tools that use perl helps the
> community, even if those products are commercial. Proprietarizing perl and
> selling it does nobody any good. We don't need forks, and we don't need
> proprietary, forced, de-facto standards.
A GPL-only license would be the only real way to achieve the goal of keeping
all forks of perl free software. However, this is something the Perl
community explicitly *does not want*, so I have no interest in even asking
for it. It might fit with my personal politics, but it is antithetical to
the community, and therefore shouldn't even be considered.
> Under the current license as I see it now, there's nothing to prevent AS
> or M$ from taking the perl source, proprietarizing it, and selling it as
> an improved perl in binary form, using predictable marketing and business
> methods, to make an entire community dependent upon them for perl itself.
> It just needs to be redistributable in source and binary if it's
> perl. Everything else is fine and dandy.
This is the case---if they call it the same name as Package, the source must
be Freely Available. They can still call it VisualPerl if they install it
to a different place. Only a trademark on Perl can stop that.
--
Bradley M. Kuhn - http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn
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