On Sat, May 27, 2006 at 06:50:07AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote: > do you think upstream is legitimated to do so? I honestly couldn't say. > I am facing the same situation with perl-Locale-Maketext-Lexicon (from > the same author). There, upstream has changed the license from > GPL/Artistic to MIT. > > IMO, by having done so, upstream probably has violated the law, because, > in general, they cannot change the license a package unless they own the > copyright of all parts a package consists of. > Locale::Maketext::Simple only lists one author, with > Locale::Maketext::Lexicon, the situation seems unclear: > http://search.cpan.org/src/AUTRIJUS/Locale-Maketext-Lexicon-0.61/AUTHORS > lists 20-25 contributors, while the source code only lists one > individual (the CPAN maintainer). Open a ticket in rt.cpan.org? Maybe email the CPAN maintainers and/or Perl Foundation for some backup? > I am not certain on how to handle the situation. To be on the safe side, > I considering to regard my perl-Locale-Maketext-Lexicon rpm as > derivative work of the original work and consider to ship it under the > GPL only. Couldn't you just call it "GPL or Artistic" still? > The fundamental questions would be: > * Who owns contributions to code in CPAN having been released under > GPL/Artistic before? > IMO: If the "contribution is copyrightable", the contributor. He is > contributing under the licenses the original author had granted. The > original author is not legitimated to change the license on such > contributions without explicit permission. > > * Is the maintainer of CPAN modules legitimated to change a license from > GPL/Artistic to MIT? > Here, I am not sure about the implications of the Artistic license. The CPAN maintainers (or somebody) needs to clarify some of these things. It would also be *really* helpful to have an explicit policy from them for things submitted to CPAN with no stated license. (I'd like to see them make everyone agree to "no license == same terms as Perl".) So far I've had this issue with both Data::UUID and OpenFrame. Steve -- Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc. Email: steve@xxxxxxxxx http://www.kspei.com/ Phone: (618)398-3000 Mobile: (618)567-7320 -- fedora-extras-list mailing list fedora-extras-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-extras-list
