All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Pugs: Licensing Clarification.

audreyt on 2006-04-24T15:43:43

(Two-sentence summary: I intend to relicense the Pugs internals code (i.e. the bin/pugs binary) to the MIT license, and only if fellow contributors are happy with that. Everything else under the Pugs tree is unaffected, and the the "compilation-right disclaimer" in README does not affect any code committed in Pugs in any way.)

I apologize that I've not conveyed the scope of licensing to our contributors properly, causing a lot of confusion.  While I have been saying "only the src/ tree will be affected" from the start, I did not clarify that the src/ here explicitly means the src/ directory in the Pugs repository, containing Haskell/C/Perl6 code that builds the main pugs executable -- i.e. it's Pugs's internals code.

I'm really, really sorry to cause people misparsing it as the "Pugs source tree".  All other subdirectories, such as t/, examples/, perl5/ ext/, doc/ and util/, remains exactly in the same licensing situation (Artistic 2.0b5/GPL) as they were.  Please see the README file for the full details, as well as my public apology to chromatic.

So, to reiterate again:

  • For Pugs contributors working on non-src/ directories, such as modules, tests, examples or documentations, nothing has changed in the licensing situation, and there is no plan at all to change them.
  • For Pugs contributors who have checked in src/, I would like to survey if you are okay with releasing your previous and future work under the MIT license.  If you are explicitly not okay, I'd like to know why.
  • Chromatic has requested that his work be pulled out from the src/ directory because he was unwilling to release it under SQLite's terms.  However, he later amended that he would be comfortable with the MIT license.
  • As my intention with src/ was merely allowing maximum reuse, I'm certainly happy to change to the MIT license's terms; I have reflected this change in the Pugs README.
  • The README does not change src/'s licensing currently; nothing will take effect until the next Pugs release, which will happen only after sufficient discussion time for src/ contributors to voice their opinions.

Aside from the src/ directory, I am uncomfortable with using Artistic license as whole-distribution compilation copyright license, because according to TPF, that may make it illegal to distribute Darren Duncan's Rosetta.pm module (GPL2+) along with Pugs, and I may have already been guilty for doing that for the past Pugs releases, just like Ruby people may be criminal for that with their regex.c (LGPL2+).

Because of this, I still wish to disclaim my compilation copyright, which basically means there is no global license that covers all of Pugs's subdirectory contents. This does not affect any contributed code in any way, and new commits in non-src/ trees are still under the Artistic2.0b5/GPL license by default, unless explicitly marked otherwise in that subdirectory or file.

Again, sorry for the confusion raised around this matter. I wish my English was more clear and succint...

(This is a repost from pugs.blogs.com; please leave a comment there instead of on use.perl.)