Re: Debian removed perlreftut

[Abigail-II]

Yes, and? It's well known that Debian believes in the saying "there's no such thing as 90% free". Something is free, or it isn't, and they have (at least for themselves) a pretty clear idea what is free, and what isn't. Now, if we look at the distribution conditions of perlreftut, it's quite restrictive. It's more restrictive than the Perl distribution itself, which allows you to accept it under either the Artistic license, or the GPL (perlreftut doesn't allow the latter). It also doesn't give you any rights to distribute it outside of the Perl distribution.

I can't blame Debian for not distributing perlreftut. In fact, if they accept Perl under the GPL, they legally are not allowed to distribute perlreftut; perlreftut doesn't give you the option of accepting it under the GPL.

In fact, I wonder whether it's right to have perlreftut in the Perl distribution if it has conditions that violate the overall conditions of the Perl distribution. Perhaps this is something that needs to be discussed on p5p.

Abigail

[jryan]

Right, because its obviously much more important to keep Perl licensially pure than to provide a manpage that is helpful to users.

[Anonymous Monk]

And your solution would be to:

1. Violate the license of perlreftut.
2. Compromise the integrity of the Debian project over a tutorial page that can easily be rewritten.
3. ???

Perhaps you should learn a bit about what you're criticizing and the potential for damage if others shared such ignorance. I suggest you start here.

[jryan]

The potential for damage? To what? Open Source Software or GNU and Debian? As far as I see it, the Debian attitude towards open source is the most damaging thing that can be done to it.

[Anonymous Monk]

Right, because its obviously much more important to keep Perl licensially pure than to provide a manpage that is helpful to users.

That's exactly right. Avoiding legal troubles is always preferable to helping "users", especially since perlref (and related manpages) already provide the workings of refrence syntaxt.

[jryan]

That is absolutely ridiculous. What good is even the most legally solid piece of software if no one can use it? I think you might want to re-evaluate your priorities as to why are you involved with open source to begin with.