Perl modules dual licensing (was Re: Bioconductor package flowPeaks license Artistic 1.0?)

[Giovanni Biscuolo]

Hi zimoun

zimoun <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Where is the License of Perl 5 and below explicitly  defined? There is
> no pointer...

Ricardo pointed you to https://dev.perl.org/licenses/, that is a web
version of this 
https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl5.git/blob/HEAD:/README

Perl is dual licensed at least since 1994-10-17 (see the README history
[1]

> What I understand is: when the License of Perl 5

There is no "License of Perl 5", it is Perl 5 that is dual licensed

The same dual license scheme is usually (usually?!?) adopted by Perl
modules, at least those on CPAN
http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html#How_is_Perl_licensed

> and below is used, then the copyright holder chooses either the
> Artistic 1.0, either the GPL.  Then the License of Perl 5 and below is
> free but non-copyleft.

Since there is no "License of Perl 5" that license cannot be qualified
:-)

> Well, it appears to me a hack. I guess that there is a lot of Perl
> packages under Artistic 1.0 which seems an issue.

I don't know how many packages/modules are distributed only using
Artistic License 1.0, but please consider that as I said above that
*many* are dual licensed.

The fact that Perl modules are (must?) commonly dual licensed is
somewhat a mystery to me, but I do not care :-D

> So let create this License of Perl 5 and below saying: choose between
> Artistic 1.0 or GPL. And because you have this choice, everything is
> fine.
>
> I probably misread

No, you do not misread: dual licensing is used in many situation and is
non a "hack", it's the decision of the copyright holder to allow
different legal uses of the software

In this particular case, **fortunately** the dual licensing was adopted
"since the beginning" to fix the problems with Artistic License

[...]

Last things about names: since Oct 2019 [2] Perl 5 is Perl (Perl 4 is
gone long ago) and Perl 6 is Raku, so finally there is no more need to
say "Perl 5" :-)

Ciao! Gio'


[1] https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl5.git/history/HEAD:/README

[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/802329/

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures

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