[Wellington-pm] Meeting Tonight

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 02:12:22PM +1200, Dan Horne wrote:
> On 14 July 2010 13:46, Andrew Chilton  wrote:
> 
> > Just one note I thought I'd ask about is that in the LICENSE file it's
> > under the GPLv1 or later or the Artistic license. Ignoring the
> > arguments about whether to dual license, wouldn't it be worth
> > upgrading to at least GPLv2 if not GPLv3. Appreciating the fact that
> > we can do that ourselves is already allowed, I would have still
> > thought putting it out under a newer than GPLv1 license would make
> > more sense for you :)
> 
> I know it sounds bad, but I don't really know the difference between the
> various Open Source licenses, and I glaze over when people try to explain
> them to me, so I'm happy to use whatever people think best. So do I still
> want the Dual License or just one of the GPL ones? Is 2 or 3 better?

"GPLv1+ or Artistic" is the licence which Perl itself is under:

http://dev.perl.org/licenses/

It's also pretty popular for stuff written in Perl (I guess partly because it
makes it easier for your module to become part of the standard distribution in
the future).

GPLv1 is pretty old and v2 probably fixes some flaws, but it is what Perl
itself has stuck with.

> Alas, I'll need to change the copyright in each package. I know Dist::Zilla
> is supposed to be able to help out with automatically adding licenses to
> files, but I haven't had time to look into it. So if someone needs a topic
> to present at the next mongers....

I'd say the most important things when choosing a licence are that it's
(a) something well known (tick, since this exact combination is used by
Perl and a lot of related modules) and (b) compatible with the GPL (tick,
since users can use it under any version of the GPL they like).

The latter matters because there's an awful lot of code using it that it would
be a shame to prevent potential users of your code from combining it with.

Most other factors in licence choice are down to more subjective factors
like personal philosophy or strategic aims.  I would say if you just want it to
be "Open Source" then your current choice is fine.

Cheers,
    Olly

P.S. If anyone is itching to find out more about userv, Ian's site for it
(with his 1998 paper) is here:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/userv/
I'll stick my slides up later (I want to correct the factual error about setuid
which Sam pointed out first).  Thanks for all the interesting comments and
discussion.  If anyone noticed any goofs but didn't think them worth pointing
out at the time, do let me know.