[Texi2html-bug] Re: FSF assignment?

[Derek Price]

Hi Karl,

Karl Berry wrote:
>     Do you think it would be possible to make Texi2HTML available under
>     a dual Perl Artistic/GPL license?   
> 
> Is it required for CPAN?  I don't object myself, but we'd have to ask rms.

It is not REQUIRED for CPAN, and the CPAN FAQ says that "most, though
not all, modules on CPAN are licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL)
or the Artistic license", but I've never noticed a module on CPAN that
isn't distributed "under the same terms as Perl itself."

Also, I would want to include the new package from my aforementioned and
already released Wiki::Toolkit plugins, which would, without this
change, I think force them to GPL instead of their current Artistic/GPL
license.  Similarly, the rest of Wiki::Toolkit, which is not mine, is
also Artistic/GPL, and I'm not sure what legal issues would be involved
with having such a module include my own if its license changed.  Does a
`use PLUGIN;' line in Perl qualify as "linking"?  What about calling a
method of an object instantiated from a GPL'd package?

Anyhow, I prefer to distribute my Perl modules under Perl's Artistic/GPL
license.  Do you have any ideas about how to approach this with rms?

> Sounds reasonable.  We could somehow build the CPAN release out of
> Texinfo too, presumably.  I'm not exactly sure how the Texinfo and CPAN
> versions would interact, but we can figure it out one way or another.
> (I mean, the Texinfo make install isn't going to be installing anything
> into /usr/local/lib/perl5 or whatever.)

I have experience with the CPAN build and install infrastructure and
could assist with the integration with Texinfo, if the Perl package can
be released under the Artistic license.  Once we've extracted a proper
package from the current script, I should be able to rattle off the
build scripts fairly quickly and it shouldn't be difficult to use the
same build structure for both a CPAN and a standard Texinfo distribution.

> (BTW, on the assignment front, it turns out Olaf Bachmann works at
> Google now.  His email is still a mystery, but I asked another GNU'er
> who works at Google to contact him.  Hopefully we'll get through to him
> in a few days.)

Hah!  Hopefully you can get ahold of him.  I tried to locate or contact
Olaf for months, once upon a time, before I just gave up and started the
new Texi2HTML repository for all the fixes and enhancements I had queued
up.  Nobody I could get ahold of at the time knew what had happened to him.

Thanks,

Derek
-- 
Derek R. Price
Solutions Architect
Ximbiot, LLC <http://ximbiot.com>
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