On 3/18/07, Gabor Szabo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
You might find this open book helpful:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/
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?
Quoting from that book:
This Section 8 accordingly limits the generally free distribution of
the source and executable codes under Section 1 and 4 respectively
when that distribution is part of a commercial aggregate with the
Package. In those situations, the Package may be utilized as part of
the commercial program, but its interfaces (and, correspondingly, the
ability to write new scripts in Perl) must be blocked from the end
user. This section is presumably included to prevent commercial
distributions of programs written in Perl from competing with the
parallel open source distributions of Perl that are intended to
encourage innovation and contributions to Perl itself.
Regards,
David
