Hi, We are about to distribute an application written in Perl using 100+ CPAN modules to our clients. The company I am working with has a very strong policy of making sure we are working within the licensing terms of the various 3rd party software.
In the 100+ modules most of the come with the almost standard text "You can distribute it under the same terms as Perl itself" but there are a few with all kinds of strange issues. Some of the modules are pure Perl some are written in C and compiled. We are planning to distribute our application under some restrictive, proprietary license. Technically we are distributing a zipped version of the compiled Perl and the CPAN modules and then we install (using Perl Makefile.PL;make;make install) our code but at some point we might distribute the whole thing in an installable exe file. I need your help to deal with the legal aspect of this. For the modules with "standard Perl licenses" we are looking at the Artistic license http://search.cpan.org/src/NWCLARK/perl-5.8.8/Artistic What are our duties when we distribute the application? - Do we have to include the original zipped distributions as downloaded from CPAN or is it enough to give a list of links to CPAN or even that is unnecessary? Based on 4.a of the Artistic license I think it should be enough to point to http://www.cpan.org - I am not sure what to do with 8. 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. What does that mean that "no overt attempt is made to make this Package's interfaces visible" ? How can I make sure we are fulfilling this requirement? I know non of you will give legal advice, I would appreciate to see what is you understanding on this issue and what do you or your organization do in similar cases? Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://www.szabgab.com/ Perl Training in Israel http://www.pti.co.il/
