Now at a CPAN mirror site near you — pmtools-1.10. Tom "spot" Callaway of Fedora Core let me know that the Fedora folks were concerned about the fact that pmtools was only licensed under the Perl 5 Artistic License (they were concerned about how well the Artistic License 1.0 would stand up in court). So, pmtools (starting with v1.10) is now dual-licensed like Perl (Artistic and GPL). (My other public Perl stuff is also dual-licensed.) I also added my copyright to pmtools, as I had not added my name to the copyright when I took it over.
Off-hand, I don't recall why Tom Christiansen used only the Artistic License for pmtools. Anyone with a clue, please drop me a line. (That of course includes you, Tom.)
Re:Are you *sure* you can change the license?
jhi on 2008-03-08T00:09:20
Seconded. I do remember tchrist being very explicitly not a fan of FSF/GPL. Please do ask his permission before relicensing his code.Re:Are you *sure* you can change the license?
sigzero on 2008-03-08T15:11:21
Or he could just use the Perl Artistic v2 that the PF lawyers poured over?Re:Are you *sure* you can change the license?
Sherm on 2008-03-10T01:04:03
I agree that discussing it with Tom would have been the polite thing to do, but I don't think it's a legal requirement.
I could understand the concern if the original were GPL'd - a key point of the GPL is that it doesn't allow relicensing.
But, the Artistic license allows one to "place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise make them Freely Available" (Conditions 3.a), where Freely Available is defined in part as meaning "... that no fee is charged for the item itself, though there may be fees involved in handling the item. It also means that recipients of the item may redistribute it under the same conditions they received it."
Note the word "may" in the above, rather than "must." That's more or less the point of the Artistic, BSD, MIT, and many other non-GPL licenses - they're specifically non-viral, and allow derived works may be released under different licenses.
Given that permission isn't legally required, I could maybe understand not talking to him about it. He's not going to change his mind about the GPL, so if you're going to relicense anyway, there's not much point in adding insult to injury by starting an argument about it too. It could be argued that doing it quietly, without rubbing his nose in it too much, was actually the polite thing to do.
sherm--Re:Are you *sure* you can change the license?
btilly on 2008-03-10T01:39:13
Unfortunately the Artistic License is not compatible with the GPL. The Artistic License says in item 5 that, You may not charge a fee for this Package itself. This is not compatible with the GPL because the GPL allows that. Similarly if you look at item 3 of the Artistic License you'll find that with the Artistic License you are not allowed to make a modification and distribute it to a third party without making your modification public. The GPL allows that.
Consult with a lawyer. But by my reading if someone uses those freedoms supplied by the GPL but not by the Artistic License, they do not have Tom Christiansen's permission for that. If there was a legal issue, Mark is likely to be the one who is liable for it.
(Of course if Tom doesn't sue, then there is no issue.)Re:Are you *sure* you can change the license?
Sherm on 2008-03-10T02:07:05
Well, frankly, I can't imagine Tom making a stink over this. The clear distinction between the GPL and BSD-style licenses like the Artistic is the right to relicense vs. the lack of it. Pretty much by definition, the right to relicense includes licenses that the original author dislikes. That's the whole point of the BSD-style position, that someone who reuses the code should be able to choose their own license.
It's like free speech in a way; it means that we all hear things said that we don't like or agree with. But we can't prevent that without abandoning the principle we claim to believe in.
At any rate, I think this is all a tempest in a teapot. Despite the hair-splitting over license terms, it's still being distributed on CPAN mirrors around the world, just like Tom's original. It's as free in practical everyday usage as it's always been.
Thanks to all of you who commented on this entry. Tom Christiansen has since said "I don't mind at all" to my dual-licensing of pmtools.
If I had remembered that Tom did not like the GPL, I would have asked him before performing the re-licensing. (I think that people should be free to license their software however they want, but personally I want their software to work and work well if they want to license it to me without the sources.)
