How to license a program written in Perl?

[ZZamboni]

Hi,

I've never been one that gets fanatical about licenses, but I need to deal with it now, so I would like to ask for your opinion.

I have a program I wrote at school for internal use in my lab, and now we want to release it to the public. My boss is flexible about choosing the license under which we will release the software.

We don't want to use GPL because we feel it "contaminates" software by propagating itself to derivative works. So I am considering using the Artistic License. It looks good, except for items 6, 7, and the last phrase of item 5 (starting at "You may embed this Package's interpreter"), which seem specific to the perl distribution. So we could use the Artistic License as is, or modify it to remove those parts.

We could also go with something simpler, such as a BSD-style license.

I'd be very happy to read your thoughts, ideas or suggestions about this, particularly if you have dealt with these issues before.

Thanks,

--ZZamboni

P.S. I noticed that the Artistic license from CPAN is different than the one from opensource.org. Anyone knows why?

[chromatic]

There are two fundamental issues licenses address:

- what kind of restrictions does the copyright holder place upon use of the software?
- what kind of restrictions does the copyright holder place upon the redistribution of the software?

In my case, though it would be a little satisfying to say that a company like Amazon.com or members of the RIAA can't use my software, I think it's more moral not to place those kinds of restrictions on my software. The open source definition doesn't allow it, either.

The real question is, "What kind of license should derived works have?" The BSD license (sans advertising clause) says that you don't mind anyone changing your license and redistributing your software. The GPL says that people who produce derivative works or redistribute them have to respect your original license.

Most other stuff falls somewhere in between.

I don't care to have other people changing the distribution rights of works derived from my work, so I don't mind the GPL at all. I do like credit being given where it's due, so the Artistic license is kinda nice too, where it says that changes made to the core program must be made clear. So I don't get blamed for really awful code.

The big philosophical difference between the BSD license and the GPL is that the former seeks to increase software freedom by providing good software with no restrictions on its use. The latter attempts to increase freedom by providing good software that can never be made less free (everyone has the same rights to it, and its derivatives).

[tilly]

There is a list for licensing issues involving perl6. I do not want to go into details, but the current Artistic License is not exactly the best license in the world to use. If you just want the world to use it, you could make it public domain. If you want to be remembered then I would suggest BSD or MIT style licenses. As you note the GPL has a specific philosophical goal. If that matches your goal, well and good, but it apparently does not.

As for why the Artistic License has multiple versions, well it would appear that the license has been patched over time.

[AgentM]

If you're interesting in making sure that other people not make "derivative" software (which is really contradicting the point of OpenSource), then you could perhaps look into the LPGL which limits expandability. Look more at it at gnu.org