On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:54:01PM +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote: > On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 11:30 PM, David Landgren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Gabor Szabo wrote: > > > As I am usually using Module::Build I did not know that a recent > > > version of MakeMaker > > > has started to support the LICENSE parameter and will include it in > > > the automatically > > > created META.yml. > > That has been the case for a couple of years or so. I think it was first > > introduced in 6.30. > Now are you telling me... :-) > and I have been giving the lack of LICENSE support of MakeMaker as the excuse > why so many modules have their Lincense set to Unknown on search.cpan.org.[1]
In my case it's because I didn't know that it was supported in the version of MakeMaker that I use (I didn't even know what version I used until just now when I checked) and also because I don't care much. I put the licence information in POD. If you care what specific licence I use for a piece of code, read the documentation. If you only care that it be free software, then you needn't bother, as that's one of the pre-requisites for something being on the CPAN. > Is that so unimportant or are the module author unaware of the way > they can add it. I don't think it's important. Anyone wanting to use, depend on, or bundle my code will surely read the documentation, and there he will find the licence. Anyway, META.yml's licence field is insufficient. A distribution may contain code and documentation under several different licences. My most recent release, for example, contains some GPLed code, some perl-licenced code, and some Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales-licenced documentation. Yes, I was very careful to make sure that the perl-licenced bits don't depend on the GPLed bit, but rather the other way round. > [1] Among others I have talked to the Debian and Fedora packagers and > they both said that one of the problematic issues with CPAN modules is > the lack or incorrect license information. How can they possibly determine whether a licence is correct or not? I would also note that the META.yml license field is insufficiently documented, and that what little documentation there is shows that the spec is buggy. This page: http://module-build.sourceforge.net/META-spec-current.html#license says that it is required, and that the list of valid options is in the Module::Build manpage. There is no such list here: http://search.cpan.org/~kwilliams/Module-Build-0.2808/lib/Module/Build.pm and it is quite wrong (this is the bug) to say that there is a list of valid options decreed by Ken Williams. How I licence my code is no business of his (and I'm sure he wouldn't claim that it is) and if I want to create Dave's Fabulous Software Licence then I am free to do so. So there's two other good reasons not to use it aside from it not being important :-) -- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david Your call is important to me. To see if it's important to you I'm going to make you wait on hold for five minutes before putting you through to Dave's mobile. This call will be recorded for quality and amusement purposes.
