At 3:16 PM +0000 10/27/02, Nicholas Clark wrote:
I've discussed this with a number of people, and it's been mentioned on the list before, but I don't know that anyone's paid much attention to it. The problem with the current scheme is twofold.On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 03:17:56PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:Please note that we're seriously considering moving to either a BSD??curious - this is the first I've been aware of this idea, so I wonder who the "we" is. Or what the cause for the formal change is? ["formal" because my reading of the artistic licence is that you can do pretty much anything with perl5 code providing you don't call it perl, and you credit the author. Hence saying the licence is BSD rather than "GPL + artistic" makes no pragmatic difference, as best I can tell. Except that other people (and other people's legal departments) may have a better idea of where they stand with a BSD licence]
1) There is some question as to whether the AL itself has any force--it's a bit fuzzy, and it may well be that the AL/GPL combo is legally just the GPL.
2) There are a lot of people who aren't comfortable, for whatever reason, releasing their code with the GPL anywhere near it. (And yes, I know it's the same no matter what license is chosen)
#1 has be a bit nervous for legal reasons. AL or GPL is very different from GPL-only, and I'd really hate to surprise anyone (especially me) in the future.
#2 has kept us from getting at least a Prolog front end for Parrot, and may well stop us from getting other code as well, though I know the same goes if we move to another license.
If we don't move over, then I'm at least tightening things down enough that our license doesn't leak out, so that someone can distribute other parrot-based language parsers, libraries, and modules without our license leaking out to their code. (And yes, I am of two minds on the core itself, as I'm not thrilled with the potential for someone making a few internal changes to the core itself and not passing those changes back to us)
This came up a while back in regards to GCC. Someone was working on a front (or back, I don't recall) end to gcc to dump out the internal representation of source as XML for some damn thing or other. This was essentially stopped (don't recall whether it was stopped outright, or GPL was put on the generated rep, which is close enough to stopping for most folks) by the GCC folks as they claimed, quite rightly, that the internal representation was a derived work of their code as well as the original source, and as such they could put their license on it too. This doesn't apply to object files that gcc generates as there's explicit disclaiming of ownership on them in gcc's license, as there is with pretty much all compilers.> One thing we will definitely be doing is officially restricting thescope of the license leakage. Parrot's license will explicitly not cover generated bytecode, nor will it cover the internal representation of anyone's source, much in the way that gcc's license doesn't apply to the object files it generates (and unlike the way gcc's license does apply to its internal representations of things)What's the significance in the internal representation? (I can't see why it matters, but presumably it does matter to someone for some reason important to them, otherwise it would never have become significant enough to need this explicit clarification.)
This is also potentially an issue with perl and things like B::Deparse, though Larry'll never exercise that. I understand why the gcc folks do it, and that's fine, and I understand why Larry won't, and that's fine too. I just want it explicit that we do *not* exercise any license or copyrights on this internal representation, as I think some really cool things can come of it. Heck, B::Deparse alone is enough, and I have no doubts there will be other Keen Things that come about because of it. I want our stand on the license/copyright issues really clear, though.
--
Dan
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