perlmeditation
jdtoronto
Esteemed Monks,
<p>
Some few weeks ago I asked in [id://385719] for advice on packaging a Tk based application. Naturally the three major contenders were
<ul><li><a href="http://www.indigostar.com/perl2exe.htm">perl2exe</a> from IndigoStar here in Toronto</li>
<li>[cpan://PAR]</li>
<li><a href="http://www.activestate.com/Products/Perl_Dev_Kit/">PerlAPP</a> from the Perl Developers Kit.</li>
</ul>
Initially I called IndigoStar and spoke to Indy Singh, he was most helpful and offered whatever support would be needed should I purchase the product and had difficulty packaging my Tk based application.
<p>
I also downloaded PAR, it worked pretty well as described. But eventually I saw this text in the license conditions:
<blockquote>
Neither this program nor the associated L<pp> program impose any
licensing restrictions on files generated by their execution, in
accordance with the 8th article of the Artistic License:
"Aggregation of this Package with a commercial distribution is
always permitted provided that the use of this Package is embedded;
that is, when no overt attempt is made to make this Package's
interfaces visible to the end user of the commercial distribution.
Such use shall not be construed as a distribution of this Package."
Therefore, you are absolutely free to place any license on the resulting
executable, as long as the packed 3rd-party libraries are also available
under the Artistic License.
</blockquote>
So I passed a copy of it to our IP lawyer who responded in this fashion:
<p>
<blockquote>If you package a product with PAR then any modules which 'we' (the corporate we) develop can be licensed under any license terms. But if we use a third-party module, it can only be one which is licensed under the 'Artistic License' in addition to any other license it is offered under.</blockquote>
So, PAR was out of the question from a licensing point of view! Our applications use a proprietary module which comes from a payment processor used by two of our clients.
<p>
Sadly, the open-source alternative lost out, but what of the other two. Well, in the end I chose PerlAPP because we purchased the Komodo package from ActiveState that had the PDK included. I might have considered perl2exe except that PerlAPP is readilly available from within the Komodo IDE.
<p>
[jdtoronto]
<b>UPDATE</b> After discovering that the text was not form the PAR license but from Tkpp - a GUI front end supplied in the same package our lawyers have revised their assessment of the license. See [id://403942] for clarification.